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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  31 

Editort : 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 

PROF.   GILBERT  MURRAY,  LiTT.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 

PROF.  J.   ARTHUR    THOMSON,  M.A. 
PROF.  WILLIAM  T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


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LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already  Published 

SHAKESPEARE By  JOHN  MASEFIELD 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  MAIR 

LANDMARKS  IN  FRENCH 
LITERATURE By  G.  L.  STRACHEY 

A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF  ARCHI- 
TECTURE   By  W.  R.  LETHABY 

Future  Issues 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  AMERICA  By  W.  P.  TRENT  and  JOHN 

ERSKINE 

THE   WRITING    OF   ENGLISH  .   By  W.  T.  BREWSTER 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS- 
SANCE     By  ROGER  E.  FRY 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  KER 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .   By  C.  T.  HAGBERT  WRIGHT 
ANCIENT  ART   AND  RITUAL  .   By  Miss  JANE  HARRISON 

THE   RENAISSANCE By  MRS.  R.  A.  TAYLOR 

THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE  .   .   By  L.  PEARSALL  SMITH 


LANDMARKS  IN 

FRENCH 
LITERATURE 

BY 
G.  L.  STRACHEY 

SOMETIME   SCHOLAR    OF   TRINITY   COLLEGE 
CAMBRIDGE 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY   HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS   AND   NORGATE 


COPYRIGHT,  igia, 

BY 

HENRY    HOLT  AND   COMPANY 


THE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  CAMBRIDGE,  U.S.A. 


TO 

J.  M.  S. 


1 22>1 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PACK 

I    ORIGINS — THE  MIDDLE  AGES 7 

II    THE  RENAISSANCE 26 

III  THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION 42 

IV  THE  AGE  OF  Louis  XIV 62 

V    THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 132 

VI    THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT 199 

VII    THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM 232 

CONCLUSION 244 

CHRONOLOGICAL    LIST  OF   AUTHORS   AND  THEIR 

PRINCIPAL  WORKS 248 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 253 

INDEX  ....                                                     ,  255 


LANDMARKS  IN  FKENCH 
LITERATURE 

CHAPTER  I 

ORIGINS — THE  MIDDLE  AGES 

WHEN  the  French  nation  gradually  came 
into  existence  among  the  ruins  of  the  Roman 
civilisation  in  Gaul,  a  new  language  was  at  the 
same  time  slowly  evolved.  This  language, 
in  spite  of  the  complex  influences  which  went 
to  the  making  of  the  nationality  of  France, 
was  of  a  simple  origin.  With  a  very  few 
exceptions,  every  word  in  the  French  vocabu- 
lary comes  straight  from  the  Latin.  The 
influence  of  the  pre-Roman  Celts  is  almost 
imperceptible;  while  the  number  of  words 
introduced  by  the  Frankish  conquerors 
amounts  to  no  more  than  a  few  hundreds. 
Thus  the  French  tongue  presents  a  curious 
contrast  to  that  of  England.  With  us,  the 
Saxon  invaders  obliterated  nearly  every  trace 
of  the  Roman  occupation;  but  though  their 
language  triumphed  at  first,  it  was  eventually 
affected  in  the  profoundest  way  by  Latin 
influences;  and  the  result  has  been  that 


8  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

English  literature  bears  in  all  its  phases  the 
imprint  of  a  double  origin.  French  literature, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  absolutely  homogeneous. 
How  far  this  is  an  advantage  or  the  reverse 
it  would  be  difficult  to  say;  but  the  important 
fact  for  the  English  reader  to  notice  is  that 
this  great  difference  does  exist  between  the 
French  language  and  his  own.  The  complex 
origin  of  the  English  tongue  has  enabled 
English  writers  to  obtain  those  effects  of 
diversity,  of  contrast,  of  imaginative  strange- 
ness, which  have  played  such  a  dominating 
part  in  our  literature.  The  genius  of  the 
French  language,  descended  from  its  single 
Latin  stock,  has  triumphed  most  in  the 
contrary  direction — in  simplicity,  in  unity, 
in  clarity,  and  in  restraint. 

Some  of  these  qualities  are  already  dis- 
tinctly visible  in  the  earliest  French  works 
which  have  come  down  to  us — the  Chansons 
de  Geste. »  These  poems  consist  of  several 
groups  or  cycles  of  narrative  verse,  cast  in  the 
epic  mould.  It  is  probable  that  they  first 
came  into  existence  in  the  eleventh  and 
twelfth  centuries;  and  they  continued  to  be. 
produced  in  various  forms  of  repetition,  re- 
arrangement, and  at  last  degradation,  through- 
out the  Middle  Ages.  Originally  they  were 
not  written,  but  recited.  Their  authors  were 


ORIGINS— THE  MIDDLE  AGES        9 

the  wandering  minstrels,  who  found,  in  the 
crowds  collected  together  at  the  great  fairs 
and  places  of  pilgrimage  of  those  early  days, 
an  audience  for  long  narratives  of  romance 
and  adventure  drawn  from  the  Latin  chron- 
icles and  the  monkish  traditions  of  a  still  more 
remote  past.  The  earliest,  the  most  famous, 
and  the  finest  of  these  poems  is  the  Chanson  de 
Roland,  which  recounts  the  mythical  incidents 
of  a  battle  between  Charlemagne,  with  "all 
his  peerage,"  and  the  hosts  of  the  Saracens. 
Apart  from  some  touches  of  the  marvellous — 
such  as  the  two  hundred  years  of  Charlemagne 
and  the  intervention  of  angels — the  whole 
atmosphere  of  the  work  is  that  of  eleventh- 
century  France,  with  its  aristocratic  society, 
its  barbaric  vigour,  its  brutality,  ajid  its  high 
sentiments  of  piety  and  honour.  The  beauty 
of  the  poem  lies  in  the  grand  simplicity  of  its 
style.  Without  a  trace  of  the  delicacy  and 
variety  of  a  Homer,  farther  still  from  the  con- 
summate literary  power  of  a  Virgil  or  a  Dante, 
the  unknown  minstrel  who  composed  the 
Chanson  de  Roland  possessed  nevertheless  a 
very  real  gift  of  art.  He  worked  on  a  large 
scale  with  a  bold  confidence.  Discarding  ab- 
solutely the  aids  of  ornament  and  the  rhetori- 
cal elaboration  of  words,  he  has  succeeded  in 
evoking  with  an  extraordinary,  naked  vivid- 


10  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

ness  the  scenes  of  strife  and  heroism  which  he 
describes.  At  his  best — in  the  lines  of  farewell 
between  Roland  and  Oliver,  and  the  well- 
known  account  of  Roland's  death — he  rises 
to  a  restrained  and  severe  pathos  which  is 
truly  sublime.  This  great  work — bleak,  bare, 
gaunt,  majestic — stands  out,  to  the  readers  of 
to-day,  like  some  huge  mass  of  ancient  granite 
on  the  far  horizon  of  the  literature  of  France. 
While  the  Chansons  de  Geste  were  develop- 
ing in  numerous  cycles  of  varying  merit,  an- 
other group  of  narrative  poems,  created  under 
different  influences,  came  into  being.  These 
were  the  Romans  Bretons,  a  series  of  ro- 
mances in  verse,  inspired  by  the  Celtic  myths 
and  traditions  which  still  lingered  in  Brittany 
and  England.  The  spirit  of  these  poems  was 
very  different  from  that  of  the  Chansons  de 
Geste.  The  latter  were  the  typical  offspring 
of  the  French  genius — positive,  definite, 
materialistic;  the  former  were  impregnated 
with  all  the  dreaminess,  the  mystery,  and  the 
romantic  spirituality  of  the  Celt.  The  legends 
upon  which  they  were  based  revolved  for  the 
most  part  round  the  history  of  King  Arthur 
and  his  knights;  they  told  of  the  strange 
adventures  of  Lancelot,  of  the  marvellous 
quest  of  the  Holy  Grail,  of  the  overwhelming 
and  fatal  loves  of  Tristan  and  Yseult.  The 


stories  gained  Bn  immense  popularity  in 
France,  but  they  did  not  long  retain  their 
original  character.  In  the  crucible  of  the 
facile  and  successful  CHRETIEN  DE  TROYES, 
who  wrote  towards  the  close  of  the  twelfth 
century,  they  assumed  a  new  complexion; 
their  mystical  strangeness  became  transmuted 
into  the  more  commonplace  magic  of  wizards 
and  conjurers,  while  their  elevated,  imma- 
terial conception  of  love  was  replaced  by  the 
superfine  affectations  of  a 


^ 

othing  shows  more  clearly  at  what  an  early 
date,  and  with  what  strength,  the  most 
characteristic  qualities  of  French  literature 
were  developed,  than  the  way  in  which  the 
vague  imaginations  of  the  Celtic  romances 
were  metamorphosed  by  French  writers  into 
the  unambiguous  jelegances  of  civilised  life. 

Both  the  Chansons  de  Geste  and  the  Romans 
Bretons  were  aristocratic  literature  :  they  were 
concerned  with  the  life  and  ideals  —  the  mar- 
tial prowess,  the  chivalric  devotion,  the  soar- 
ing honour  —  of  the  great  nobles  of  the  age. 
But  now  another  form  of  literature  ,  arose 
which  depicted,  in  short  verse  narratives,  the 
more  ordinary  conditions  of  middle-class  life. 
These  Fabliaux,  as  they  were  called,  are  on  the 
whole  of  no  great  value  as  works  of  art;  their 
poetical  form  is  usually  poor,  and  their 


12  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

substance  exceedingly  gross.  Their  chief 
interest  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  reveal,  no 
less  clearly  than  the  aristocratic  Chansons, 
some  of  the  most  abiding  qualities  of  the 
French  genius.  Its  innate  love  of  absolute 
realism  and  its  peculiar  capacity  for  cutting 
satire — these  characteristics  appear  in  the 
Fabliaux  in  all  their  completeness.  In  one 
or  two  of  the  stories,  when  the  writer  possesses 
a  true  vein  of  sensibility  and  taste,  we  find  a 
surprising  vigour  of  perception  and  a  remark- 
able psychological  power.  Resembling  the 
Fabliaux  in  their  realism  and  their  bourgeois 
outlook,  but  far  more  delicate  and  witty,  the 
group  of  poems  known  as  the  Roman  de  Re- 
nard  takes  a  high  place  in  the  literature  of  the 
age.  The  humanity,  the  dramatic  skill,  and 
the  command  of  narrative  power  displayed  in 
some  of  these  pleasant  satires,  where  the 
foibles  and  the  cunning  of  men  and  women 
are  thinly  veiled  under  the  disguise  of  animal 
life,-  give  a  foretaste  of  the  charming  art  which 
was  to  blossom  forth  so  wonderfully  four 
centuries  later  in  the  Fables  of  La  Fontaine. 
One  other  work  has  come  down  to  us  from 
this  early  epoch,  which  presents  a  complete 
contrast,  both  with  the  rough,  bold  spirit  of 
the  Chansons  de  Geste  and  the  literal  realism 
of  the  Fabliaux.  This  is  the  "chante-fable" 


ORIGIN&-THE  MIDDLE  AGES       13 

(or  mingled  narrative  in  verse  and  prose)  of 
Aucassin  et  Nicolete.  Here  all  is  delicacy  and 
exquisiteness — the  beauty,  at  once  fragile 
and  imperishable,  of  an  enchanting  work  of 
art.  The  unknown  author  has  created,  in  his 
light,  clear  verse  and  his  still  more  graceful 
and  poetical  prose,  a  delicious  atmosphere  of 
delicate  romance.  It  is  "the  tender  eye-dawn 
of  aurorean  love"  that  he  shows  us — the 
happy,  sweet,  almost  childish  passion  of  two 
young  creatures  who  move,  in  absolute 
innocence  and  beauty,  through  a  wondrous 
world  of  their  own.  The  youth  Aucassin, 
who  rides  into  the  fight  dreaming  of  his 
beloved,  who  sees  her  shining  among  the  stars 
in  heaven — 

"Estoilette,  je  te  voi, 
Que  la  lune  trait  a  soi; 
Nicolete  est  avec  toi, 
M'amiete  o  le  blond  poil." 

("Little  star,  I  see  thee  there, 
That  the  moon  draws  close  to  her ! 
Nicolette  is  with  thee  there, 
My  love  of  the  yellow  hair.") — 

who  disdains  the  joys  of  Paradise,  since  they 
exclude  the  joys  of  loving — 


14  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

"En  paradis  qu'ai-je  a  faire?  Je  n'i  quier 
entrer,  mais  que  j'aie  Nicolete,  ma  tres 
douce  amie  que  j'aime  tant.  .  .  .  Mais  en 
enfer  voil  jou  aler.  Car  en  enfer  vont  li  bel 
clerc  et  li  bel  cevalier,  qui  sont  mort  as 
tournois  et  as  rices  guerres,  et  li  bien  sergant, 
et  li  franc  homme.  .  .  .  Avec  ciax  voil  jou 
aler,  mais  que  j'aie  Nicolete,  ma  tres  douce 
amie,  avec  moi."  ("What  have  I  to  do  in 
Paradise?  I  seek  not  to  enter  there,  so  that 
I  have  Nicolette,  my  most  sweet  friend, 
whom  I  love  so  well.  .  .  .  But  to  Hell  will 
I  go.  For  to  Hell  go  the  fine  clerks  and  the 
fine  knights,  who  have  died  in  tourneys 
and  in  rich  wars,  and  the  brave  soldiers  and 
the  free-born  men.  .  .  .  With  these  will 
I  go,  so  that  I  have  Nicolette,  my  most 
sweet  friend,  with  me.") 

— Aucassin,  at  once  brave  and  naif,  sensuous 
and  spiritual,  is  as  much  the  type  of  the 
perfect  medieval  lover  as  Romeo,  with  his 
ardour  and  his  vitality,  is  of  the  Renais- 
sance one.  But  the  poem — for  in  spite  of 
the  prose  passages,  the  little  work  is  hi 
effect  simply  a  poem — is  not  all  sentiment 
and  dreams.  With  admirable  art  the  author 
has  interspersed  here  and  there  contrasting 
episodes  of  realism  or  of  absurdity;  he  has 


woven  into  his  story  a  succession  of  vivid 
dialogues,  and  by  means  of  an  acute  sense  of 
observation  he  has  succeeded  in  keeping  his 
airy  fantasy  in  touch  with  actual  things.  The 
description  of  Nicolette,  escaping  from  her 
prison,  and  stepping  out  over  the  grass  in  her 
naked  feet,  with  the  daisies,  as  she  treads  on 
them,  showing  black  against  her  whiteness  is 
a  wonderful  example  of  his  power  of  combing 
ing  imagination  with  detail,  beauty  with 
_truth.  Together  with  the  Chanson  de  Roland 
—though  in  such  an  infinitely  different  style 
— Aucassin  et  Nicolete  represents  the  most 
valuable  elements  in  the  French  poetry  of  this 
early  age. 

With  the  thirteenth  century  a  new  devel- 
opment began,  and  one  of  the  highest  im- 
portance— the  development  of  Prose.  La 
Conquete  de  Constantinople,  by  VILLEHAR- 
DOUIN,  written  at  the  beginning  of  the  century, 
is  the  earliest  example  of  those  historical 
memoirs  which  were  afterwards  to  become  so 
abundant  in  French  literature;  and  it  is  writ- 
ten, not  in  the  poetical  prose  of  Aucassin  et 
Nicolete,  but  in  the  simple,  plain  style  of 
straightforward  narrative.  The  book  cannot 
be  ranked  among  the  masterpieces;  but  it  has 
the  charm  of  sincerity  and  that  kind  of  pleas- 
ant flavour  which  belongs  to  innocent  an- 


16  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

tiquity.  The  good  old  Villehardouin  has 
something  of  the  engaging  naivete,  something 
of  the  romantic  curiosity,  of  Herodotus.  And 
in  spite  of  the  sobriety  and  dryness  of  his 
writing,  he  can,  at  moments,  bring  a  sense  of 
colour  and  movement  into  his  words.  His 
description  of  the  great  fleet  of  the  crusaders, 
starting  from  Corfu,  has  this  fine  sentence: 
"Et  le  jour  fut  clair  et  beau:  et  le  vent  doux 
et  bon.  Et  ils  laisserent  aller  les  voiles  au 
vent."  His  account  of  the  spectacle  of  Con- 
stantinople, when  it  appeared  for  the  first 
time  to  the  astonished  eyes  of  the  Christian 
nobles,  is  well  known:  "Ils  ne  pouvaient 
croire  que  si  riche  ville  put  etre  au  monde, 
quand  ils  virent  ces  hauts  murs  et  ces  riches 
tours  dont  elle  etait  close  tout  autour  a  la 
ronde,  et  ces  riches  palais  et  ces  hautes 
eglises.  .  .  .  Et  sachez  qu'il  n'y  eut  si 
hardi  a  qui  la  chair  ne  f remit;  et  ce  ne  fut 
une  merveille;  car  jamais  si  grande  affaire  ne 
fut  entreprise  de  nulles  gens,  depuis  que  le 
monde  fut  cree."  Who  does  not  feel  at  such 
words  as  these,  across  the  ages,  the  thrill  of 
the  old  adventure! 

A  higher  level  of  interest  and  significance 
is  reached  by  JOINVILLE  in  his  Vie  de  Saint 
Louis,  written  towards  the  close  of  the  cen- 
tury. The  fascination  of  the  book  lies  in  its 


human  qualities.  Joinville  narrates,  in  the 
easy  flowing  tone  of  familiar  conversation, 
his  reminiscences  of  the  good  king  in  whose 
service  he  had  spent  the  active  years  of  his 
life,  and  whose  memory  he  held  in  adoration. 
The  deeds,  the  words,  the  noble  sentiments, 
the  saintly  devotion  of  Louis — these  things  he 
relates  with  a  charming  and  ingenuous  sym- 
pathy, yet  with  a  perfect  freedom  and  an 
absolute  veracity.  Nor  is  it  only  the  charac- 
ter of  his  master  that  Joinville  has  brought 
into  his  pages;  his  book  is  as  much  a  self- 
revelation  as  a  biography.  Unlike  Villehar- 
douin,  whose  chronicle  shows  hardly  a  trace 
of  personal  feeling,  Joinville  speaks  of  him- 
self unceasingly,  and  has  impressed  his  work 
indelibly  with  the  mark  of  his  own  indi- 
viduality. Much  of  its  charm  depends  upon 
the  contrast  which  he  thus  almost  uncon- 
sciously reveals  between  himself  and  his  mas- 
ter— the  vivacious,  common-sense,  eminently 
human  nobleman,  and  the  grave,  elevated, 
idealising  king.  In  their  conversations,  re- 
counted with  such  detail  and  such  relish  by 
Joinville,  the  whole  force  of  this  contrast 
becomes  delightfully  apparent.  One  seems 
to  see  in  them,  compressed  and  symbolised 
in  the  characters  of  these  two  friends,  the 
conflicting  qualities  of  sense  and  spirit,  of 


18  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

worldliness  and  self-immolation,  of  the  most 
shrewd  and  literal  perspicacity  and  the 
most  visionary  exaltation,  which  make 
up  the  singular  antithesis  of  the  Middle 
Ages. 

A  contrast  no  less  complete,  though  of  a 
different  nature,  is  to  be  found  in  the  most 
important  poetical  work  of  the  thirteenth 
century — Le  Roman  de  la  Rose.  The  first 
part  of  this  curious  poem  was  composed  by 
GUILLAUME  DE  LoRRis,  a  young  scholar  who 
wrote  for  that  aristocratic  public  which,  in  the 
previous  generation,  had  been  fascinated  by 
the  courtly  romances  of  Chretien  de  Troyes. 
Inspired  partly  by  that  writer,  and  partly 
by  Ovid,  it  was  the  aim  of  Lorris  to  produce 
an  Art  of  Love,  brought  up  to  date,  and 
adapted  to  the  tastes  of  his  aristocratic 
audience,  with  all  the  elaborate  paraphernalia 
of  learned  disquisition  and  formal  gallantry 
which  was  then  the  mode.  The  poem,  cast 
in  the  form  of  an  intricate  allegory,  is  of 
significance  chiefly  on  account  of  its  immense 
popularity,  and  for  its  being  the  fountain-head 
of  a  school  of  allegorical  poetry  which  flour- 
ished for  many  centuries  in  France.  Lorris 
died  before  he  had  finished  his  work,  which, 
however,  was  destined  to  be  completed  in  a 
singular  manner.  Forty  years  later,  another 


young  scholar,  JEAN  DE  MEUNG,  added  to 
the  4000  lines  which  Lorris  had  left  no  fewer 
than  18,000  of  his  own.  This  vast  addition 
was  not  only  quite  out  of  proportion  but 
also  quite  out  of  tone  with  the  original  work. 
Jean  de  Meung  abandoned  entirely  the  refined 
and  aristocratic  atmosphere  of  his  predecessor, 
and  wrote  with  all  the  realism  and  coarseness 
of  the  middle  class  of  that  day.  Lorris's 
vapid  allegory  faded  into  insignificance,  be- 
coming a  mere  peg  for  a  huge  mass  of  ex- 
traordinarily varied  discourse.  The  whole  of 
the  scholastic  Ieanmigj^tJie_^MiflrTlf>  Ages  is 
poured  in  a  confused  stream  through  thisjre- 
"markabLeand  deeply  interesting  work.  Nor  is 
"Tt  merely  as  arepository  of  medieval  erudition 
that  Jean  de  Meung's  poem  deserves  atten- 
tion; for  it  is  easy  to  perceive  in  it  an  in- 
tellectual tendency  far  in  advance  of  its  age — 
a  spirit  which,  however  trammelled  by  anti- 
quated conventions,  yet  claims  kinship  with 
that  of  Rabelais,  or  even  that  of  Voltaire. 
Jean  de  Meung  was  not  a  great  artist;  he 
wrote  without  distinction,  and  without  sense 
of  form;  it  is  his  bold  and  voluminous  thought 
that  gives  him  a  high  place  in  French  litera- 
ture. In  virtue  alike  of  his  popularisation  of 
an  encyclopaedic  store  of  knowledge  and  of 
his  underlying  doctrine — the  worship  of  Na- 


20  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

ture — he  ranks  as  a  true  forerunner  of  the 
great  movement  of  the  Renaissance. 

The  intellectual  stirring,  which  seemed  to 
be  foreshadowed  by  the  second  part  of  the 
Roman  de  la  Rose,  came  to  nothing.  The 
disasters  and  confusion  of  the  Hundred 
Years'  War  left  France  with  very  little  energy 
either  for  art  or  speculation;  the  horrors  of  a 
civil  war  followed;  and  thus  the  fourteenth 
and  fifteenth  centuries  are  perhaps  the 
emptiest  in  the  annals  of  her  literature.  In 
the  fourteenth  century  one  great  writer 
embodied  the  character  of  the  time.  FROIS- 
SART  has  filled  his  splendid  pages  with  "the 
pomp  and  circumstance  of  glorious  war." 
Though  he  spent  many  years  and  a  large  part 
of  his  fortune  in  the  collection  of  materials 
for  his  history  of  the  wars  between  France 
and  England,  it  is  not  as  an  historian  that  he 
is  now  remembered;  it  is  as  a  writer  of  magni- 
ficent prose.  His  Chroniques,  devoid  of  any 
profundity  of  insight,  any  true  grasp  of 
the  movements  of  the  age,  have  rarely  been 
paralleled  in  the  brilliance  and  animation  of 
their  descriptions,  the  vigour  of  their  charac- 
ter-drawing, the  flowing  picturesqueness  of 
their  style.  They  unroll  themselves  like  some 
long  tapestry,  gorgeously  inwoven  with  scenes 
of  adventure  and  chivalry,  with  flags  and 


ORIGINS— THE  MIDDLE  AGES      21 

spears  and  chargers,  and  the  faces  of  high-born 
ladies  and  the  mail-clad  figures  of  knights. 
Admirable  in  all  his  descriptions,  it  is  in  his 
battle-pieces  that  Froissart  particularly  ex- 
cels. Then  the  glow  of  his  hurrying  sentences 
redoubles,  and  the  excitement  and  the  bravery 
of  the  combat  rush  out  from  his  pen  in  a  swift 
and  sparkling  stream.  One  sees  the  serried 
ranks  and  the  flashing  armour,  one  hears  the 
clash  of  weapons  and  the  shouting  of  the  cap- 
tains: "Montjoie!  Saint  Denis!  Saint  Gorge! 
Giane!" — one  feels  the  sway  and  the  press 
and  the  tumult,  one  laments  with  the  van- 
quished, one  exults  with  the  victors,  and,  amid 
the  glittering  panoply  of  "grant  seigneur, 
conte,  baron,  chevalier,  et  escuier"  with  their 
high-sounding  titles  and  their  gallant  prow- 
ess, one  forgets  the  reverse  side  of  all  this 
glory — the  ravaged  fields,  the  smoking  vil- 
lages, the  ruined  peasants — the  long  desola- 
tion of  France. 

The  Chronicles  of  Froissart  are  history  seen 
through  the  eyes  of  a  herald;  the  Memoirs  of 
PHILIPPE  DE  COMMYNES  are  history  envisaged 
by  a  politician  and  a  diplomatist.  When 
Commynes  wrote — towards  the  close  of  the 
fifteenth  century — the  confusion  and  strife 
which  Froissart  had  chronicled  with  such  a 
gusto  were  things  of  the  past,  and  France  was 


22 

beginning  to  emerge  as  a  consolidated  and 
centralised  state.  Commynes  himself,  one  of 
the  confidential  ministers  of  Louis  XI,  had 
played  an  important  part  in  this  develop- 
ment; and  his  book  is  the  recqrd  of  the 
triumphant  policy  of  his  crafty  and  sagacious 
sovereign.  It  is  a  fine  piece  of  history,  written 
with  lucidity  and  firmness,  by  a  man  who  had 
spent  all  his  life  behind  the  scenes,  and  who 
had  never  been  taken  in.  The  penetration 
and  the  subtlety  of  Commynes  make  his  work 
interesting  chiefly  for  its  psychological  studies 
and  for  the  light  that  it  throws  on  those 
principles  of  cunning  statecraft  which  per- 
meated the  politics  and  diplomacy  of  the  age 
and  were  to  receive  their  final  exposition  in 
the  "Prince"  of  Machiavelli.  In  his  calm, 
judicious,  unaffected  pages  we  can  trace  the 
first  beginnings  of  that  strange  movement 
which  was  to  convert  the  old  Europe  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  with  its  universal  Empire  and 
its  universal  Church,  into  the  new  Europe  of 
independent  secular  nations — the  Europe  of 
to-day. 

Commynes  thus  stands  on  the  brink  of  the 
modern  world;  though  his  style  is  that  of  his 
own  time,  his  matter  belongs  to  the  future: 
he  looks  forward  into  the  Renaissance.  At 
the  opposite  end  of  the  social  scale  from  this 


rich  and  powerful  diplomatist,  VILLON  gave 
utterance  in  language  of  poignant  beauty  to 
the  deepest  sentiments  of  the  age  that  was 
passing  away.  A  ruffian,  a  robber,  a  murderer, 
haunting  the  vile  places  of  Paris,  flying  from 
justice,  condemned,  imprisoned,  almost  exe- 
cuted, and  vanishing  at  last,  none  knows  how 
or  where,  this  extraordinary  genius  lives  now 
as  a  poet  and  a  dreamer — an  artist  who  could 
clothe  in  unforgettable  verse  the  intensest 
feelings  of  a  soul.  The  bulk  of  his  work  is 
not  large.  In  his  Grand  Testament — a  poem 
of  about  1500  lines,  containing  a  number  of 
interspersed  ballades  and  rondeaus — in  his 
Petit  Testament,  and  in  a  small  number  of 
miscellaneous  poems,  he  has  said  all  that 
he  has  to  say.  The  most  self-communicative 
of  poets,  he  has  impressed  his  own  personality 
on  every  line  that  he  wrote.  Into  the  stiff 
and  complicated  forms  of  the  rondeau  and 
rondel,  the  ballade  and  double  ballade,  with 
their  limited  rhymes  and  their  enforced 
repetitions,  he  has  succeeded  in  breathing  not 
only  the  spirit  of  beauty,  but  the  spirit  of 
individuality.  He  was  not  a  simple  character; 
his  melancholy  was  shot  with  irony  and 
laughter;  sensuality  and  sentimentality  both 
mingled  with  his  finest  imaginations  and  his 
profoundest  visions;  and  all  these  qualities 


24  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

are  reflected,  shifting  and  iridescent,  in  the 
magic  web  of  his  verse.  One  thought,  how- 
ever, perpetually  haunts  him;  under  all  his 
music  of  laughter  or  of  passion,  it  is  easy  to 
hear  one  dominating  note.  It  is  the  thought 
of  mortality.  The  whining,  leering,  brooding 
creature  can  never  for  a  moment  forget  that 
awful  Shadow.  He  sees  it  in  all  its  aspects — 
as  a  subject  for  mockery,  for  penitence,  for 
resignation,  for  despair.  He  sees  it  as  the 
melancholy,  inevitable  end  of  all  that  is 
beautiful,  all  that  is  lovely  on  earth. 

"Dictes  moi  ou,  n'en  quel  pays 
Est  Flora,  la  belle  Rommaine; 
Archipiada,  ne  Thai's" — 

and  so  through  the  rest  of  the  splendid  cata- 
logue with  its  sad,  unanswerable  refrain — 

"Mais  ou  sont  les  neiges  d'antan?" 

Even  more  persistently,  the  vision  rises 
before  him  of  the  physical  terrors  of  death — 
the  hideousness  of  its  approaches,  the  loath- 
someness of  its  corruptions;  in  vain  he  smiles, 
in  vain  he  weeps;  the  grim  imagination  will 
not  leave  him.  In  the  midst  of  his  wildest  de- 
bauches, he  suddenly  remembers  the  horrible 
features  of  decaying  age;  he  repents;  but 


ORIGINS— THE  MIDDLE  AGES      25 

there,  close  before  him,  he  sees  the  fatal 
gibbet,  and  his  own  body  swinging  among 
the  crows. 

With  Villon  the  medieval  literature  of 
France  comes  at  once  to  a  climax  and  a 
termination.  His  potent  and  melancholy 
voice  vibrates  with  the  accumulated  passion 
and  striving  and  pain  of  those  far-off  genera- 
tions, and  sinks  mysteriously  into  silence  with 
the  birth  of  a  new  and  happier  world. 


CHAPTER  H 

THE  KENAISSANCE 

THERE  is  something  dark  and  wintry  about 
the  atmosphere  of  the  later  Middle  Ages.  The 
poems  of  Villon  produce  the  impression  of 
some  bleak,  desolate  landscape  of  snow- 
covered  roofs  and  frozen  streets,  shut  in  by 
mists,  and  with  a  menacing  shiver  in  the  air. 
It  is— 

"sur  la  morte  saison, 
Que  les  loups  se  vivent  de  vent, 
Et  qu'on  se  tient  en  sa  maison, 
Pour  le  frimas,  pres  du  tison." 

Then  all  at  once  the  grey  gloom  lifts,  and  we 
are  among  the  colours,  the  sunshine,  and  the 
bursting  vitality  of  spring. 

The  great  intellectual  and  spiritual  change 
which  came  over  western  Europe  at  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century  was  the 
result  of  a  number  of  converging  causes,  of 
which  the  most  important  were  the  diffusion 
of  classical  literature  cpnsequent^  _upon_jthe 
break-up  oi  the~Byzantine  Empire  at  the 


THE  RENAISSANCE  27 

hands  of  the  Turks,  the^brilliant  civilisation 
of  the  Italian  city-states,  andjthe_gsjtahlish- 
ment,  in  France,  Spain,  and  England,  of 
^owerlu^jno^narcEieTwhose  existence  ensured 
the  maintenance  oTbrder  and  intCTnaTpeaceT 
Thus  it  happened  that  the  splendid  literature  ~ 
of  the  Ancient  World — so  rich  in  beauty  and 
so  significant  in  thought — came  into  hands 
worthy  of  receiving  it.  Scholars,  artists,  and 
thinkers  seized  upon  the  wondrous  heritage 
and  found  in  it  a  whole  unimagined  universe 
of  instruction  and  delight.  At  the  same  time 
the  physical  discoveries  of  explorers  and  men 
of  science  opened  out  vast  fresh  regions  of 
speculation  and  adventure.  Men  saw  with 
astonishment  the  old  world  of  their  fathers 
vanishing  away,  and,  within  them  and  with- 
out them,  the  dawning  of  a  new  heaven  and  a 
new  earth.  The  effect  on  literature  of  these 
combined  forces  was  enormous.  In  France  r~ 
particularly,  under  the  strong  and  brilliant! 
government  of  Francis  I,  there  was  an  out- 
burst of  original  and  vital  writing.  This 
literature,  which  begins,  in  effect,  what  may 
be  called  the  distinctively  modern  literature 
of  France,  differs  in  two  striking  respects 
from  that  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Both  in  their 
attitude  towards  art  and  in  their  attitude 
towards  thought,  the  great  writers  of  the 


28  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Renaissance  inaugurated  a  new  era  in  French 
literature. 

The  new  artistic  views  of  the  age  first 
appeared,  as  was  natural,  in  the  domain  of 
poetry.  The  change  was  one  towards  con- 
sciousness and  deliberate,  self-critical  effort. 
The  medieval  poets  had  sung  with  beauty; 
but  that  was  not  enough  for  the  poets  of  the 
Renaissance:  they  determined  to  sing  not 
only  with  beauty,  but  with  care.  The  move- 
ment began  in  the  verse  of  MAROT,  whose 
clear,  civilised,  worldly  poetry  shows  for  the 
first  tune  that  tendency  to  select  and  to  refine, 
that  love  of  ease  and  sincerity,  and  that 
endeavour  to  say  nothing  that  is  not  said 
well,  which  were  to  become  the  fundamental 
characteristics  of  all  that  was  best  in  French 
poetry  for  the  next  three  hundred  years.  In 
such  an  exquisite  little  work  of  art  as  his 
epistle  in  three-syllabled  verse — "A  une 
Damoyselle  Malade,"  beginning — 

"Ma  mignonne, 
Je  vous  donne 
Le  bonjour," 

we  already  have,  in  all  its  completeness  that 
tone  of  mingled  distinction,  gaiety  and  grace 
which  is  one  of  the  unique  products  of  the 


THE  RENAISSANCE  29 

mature  poetical  genius  of  France.  But 
Marot's  gift  was  not  wide  enough  for  the 
voluminous  energies  of  the  age;  and  it  was  not 
until  a  generation  later,  in  the  work  of  the 
Pleiade — a  group  of  writers  of  whom  RON- 
SARD  was  the  chief,  and  who  flourished  about 
the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century — that  the 
poetical  spirit  of  the  French  Renaissance 
found  its  full  expression. 

The  mere  fact  that  the  Pleiade  formed  a 
definite  school,  with  common  principles  and 
a  fixed  poetical  creed,  differentiates  them  in  a 
striking  way  from  the  poets  who  had  preceded 
them.  They  worked  with  no  casual  purpose, 
no  merely  professional  art,  but  with  a  high 
sense  of  the  glory  of  their  calling  and  a  noble 
determination  to  give  to  the  Muses  whom 
they  worshipped  only  of  their  best.  They 
boldly  asserted — in  Du  Bellay's  admirable 
essay,  La  Defense  et  Illustration  de  la  Langue 
Franqaise — the  right  of  the  French  language 
to  stand  beside  those  of  the  ancients,  as  a 
means  of  poetical  expression;  and  they  de- 
voted their  lives  to  the  proof  of  their  doctrine. 
But  their  respect  for  their  own  tongue  by  no 
means  implied  a  neglect  of  the  Classics.  On 
the  contrary,  they  shared  to  the  full  the 
adoration  of  their  contemporaries  for  the 
learning  and  the  literature  of  the  Ancient 


30  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

World.  They  were  scholars  as  well  as  poets; 
and  their  great  object  was  to  create  a  tradition 
in  the  poetry  of  France  which  should  bring  it 
into  accord  with  the  immortal  models  of 
Greece  and  Rome.  This  desire  to  imitate 
classical  literature  led  to  two  results.  In 
the  first  place,  it  led  to  the  invention  of  a  great 
number  of  new  poetical  forms,  and  the  aban- 
donment of  the  old  narrow  and  complicated 
conventions  which  had  dominated  the  poetry 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  With  the  free  and  ample 
forms  of  the  Classics  before  them,  Ronsard 
and  his  school  enfranchised  French  verse. 
Then*  technical  ability  was  very  great;  and 
it  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that  the  result 
of  their  efforts  was  the  creation  of  something 
hitherto  lacking  in  French  literature — a 
poetical  instrument  which,  in  its  strength,  its 
freedom,  its  variety  of  metrical  resources, 
and  its  artistic  finish,  was  really  adequate 
to  fulfil  the  highest  demands  of  genius.  In 
this  direction  their  most  important  single 
achievement  was  their  elevation  of  the 
"Alexandrine"  verse — the  great  twelve- 
syllabled  rhyming  couplet — to  that  place  of 
undisputed  superiority  over  all  other  metres 
which  it  has  ever  since  held  in  French  poetry. 
But  the  PUiade's  respect  for  classical  mod- 
els led  to  another  and  a  far  less  fortunate 


THE  RENAISSANCE  31 

result.  They  allowed  their  erudition  to  im- 
pinge upon  their  poetry,  and,  in  their  eager- 
ness to  echo  the  voice  of  antiquity,  they  too 
often  failed  to  realise  the  true  bent  either  of 
their  own  language  or  their  own  powers.  This 
is  especially  obvious  in  the  longer  poems  of 
Ronsard — his  Odes  and  his  Franciade — where 
all  the  effort  and  skill  of  the  poet  have  not 
been  enough  to  save  his  verse  from  tedium 
and  inflation.  The  Classics  swam  into  the 
ken  of  these  early  discoverers  in  such  a  blaze 
of  glory  that  their  eyes  were  dazzled  and 
their  feet  misled.  It  was  owing  to  their  very 
eagerness  to  imitate  their  great  models  ex- 
actly— to  "ape  the  outward  form  of  majesty" 
—that  they  failed  to  realise  the  true  inward 
spirit  of  Classical  Art. 

It  is  in  their  shorter  poems — when  the 
stress  of  classical  imitation  is  forgotten  in  the 
ebullition  of  individual  genius — that  Ronsard 
and  his  followers  really  come  to  their  own. 
These  beautiful  lyrics  possess  the  freshness 
and  charm  of  some  clear  April  morning, 
with  its  delicate  flowers  and  its  carolling 
birds.  It  is  the  voice  of  youth  that  sings  in 
light  and  varied  measures,  composed  with 
such  an  exquisite  happiness,  such  an  un- 
laboured art.  The  songs  are  of  Love  and  of 
Nature,  of  roses,  skylarks,  and  kisses,  of  blue 


32  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

skies  and  natural  joys.  Sometimes  there  is 
a  sadder  note;  and  the  tender  music  reminds 
us  of  the  ending  of  pleasures  and  the  hurrying 
steps  of  Time.  But  with  what  a  different 
accent  from  that  of  the  dark  and  relentless 
Villon!  These  gentle  singers  had  no  words 
for  such  brutalities. 

"Quand  vous  serez  bien  vieille,  au  soir,  a  la 
chandelle" — 

so  Ronsard  addresses  his  mistress;  and  the 
image  is  a  charming  one  of  quiet  and  refined 
old  age,  with  its  half-smiling  memories  of 
vanished  loves.  What  had  become,  in  the 
hands  of  Villon,  a  subject  for  grim  jests  and 
horrible  descriptions,  gave  to  Ronsard  simply 
an  opportunity  for  the  delicate  pathos  of 
regret.  Then  again  the  note  changes,  and  the 
pure,  tense  passion  of  Louise  Labe — 

"Oh!  si  j'etais  en  ce  beau  sein  ravie 
De  celui-la  pour  lequel  vais  mourant"- 

falls  upon  our  ears.  And  then,  in  the  great 
Sonnet  Sequence  of  Du  Bellay — Les  Anti- 
quites  de  Rome — we  hear  a  splendid  sound 
unknown  before  in  French  poetry — the  son- 
orous boom  of  proud  and  pompous  verse. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  33 

Contemporary  with  the  poetry  of  the 
Pleiade,  the  influence  of  the  Renaissance 
spirit  upon  French  literature  appeared  with 
even  more  striking  force  in  the  prose  of 
RABELAIS.  The  great  achievement  of  the 
Pleiade  had  been  the  establishment,  once  and 
for  all,  of  the  doctrine  that  literature  was 
something  essentially  artistic;  it  was  Rabelais 
who  showed  that  it  possessed  another  quality 
— that  it  was  a  mighty  instrument  of  thought. 
The  intellectual  effort  of  the  Middle  Ages 
had  very  rarely  clothed  itself  in  an  artistic 
literary  form.  Men  laughed  or  wept  in  the 
poetry  or  prose  of  their  own  tongue;  but 
they  thought  in  scholastic  Latin.  The  work 
of  Jean  de  Meung  was  an  exception;  but,  even 
there,  the  poetical  form  was  rough  and  feeble; 
the  artistic  and  the  intellectual  principles 
had  not  coalesced.  The  union  was  accom- 
plished by  Rabelais.  Far  outstripping  Jean 
de  Meung  in  the  comprehensiveness  and 
vigour  of  his  thought,  he  at  the  same  time 
infinitely  surpassed  him  as  an  artist.  At  first 
sight,  indeed,  his  great  book  hardly  conveys 
such  an  impression;  to  a  careless  reader  it 
might  appear  to  be  simply  the  work  of  a 
buffoon  or  a  madman.  But  such  a  conception 
of  it  would  be  totally  mistaken.  The  more 
closely  one  examines  it,  the  more  forcibly 


34  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

one  must  be  struck  alike  by  its  immense 
powers  of  intellect  and  its  consummate 
literary  ability.  The  whole  vast  spirit  of 
the  Renaissance  is  gathered  within  its  pages: 
the  tremendous  vitality,  the  enormous  erudi- 
tion, the  dazzling  optimism,  the  courage,  the 
inventiveness,  the  humanity,  of  that  extraor- 
dinary age.  And  these  qualities  are  con- 
veyed to  us,  not  by  some  mere  conscientious 
pedant,  or  some  clumsy  enthusiast,  but  by 
a  born  writer — a  man  whose  whole  being  was 
fixed  and  concentrated  in  an  astonishing 
command  of  words.  It  is  in  the  multitude  of 
his  words  that  the  fertility  of  Rabelais'  spirit 
most  obviously  shows  itself.  His  book  is 
an  orgy  of  words;  they  pour  out  helter- 
skelter,  wildly,  into  swirling  sentences  and 
huge  catalogues  that,  in  serried  columns, 
overflow  the  page.  Not  quite  wildly,  though; 
for,  amid  all  the  rush  and  bluster,  there  is 
a  powerful  underlying  art.  The  rhythms  of 
this  extraordinary  prose  are  long  and  complex, 
but  they  exist;  and  they  are  controlled  with 
the  absolute  skill  of  a  master. 

The  purpose  of  Rabelais'  book  cannot  be 
summed  up  in  a  sentence.  It  may  be  de- 
scribed as  the  presentment  of  a  point  of 
view:  but  what  point  of  view?  There  lies 
the  crux  of  the  question,  and  numberless 


THE  RENAISSANCE  35 

critics  have  wrangled  over  the  solution  of  it. 
The  truth  is,  that  the  only  complete  descrip- 
tion of  the  point  of  view  is  to  be  found — in 
the  book  itself;  it  is  too  wide  and  variegated 
for  any  other  habitation.  Yet,  if  it  would 
be  vain  to  attempt  an  accurate  and  exhaustive 
account  of  Rabelais'  philosophy,  the  main 
outlines  of  that  philosophy  are  nevertheless 
visible  enough.  Alike  in  the  giant-hero, 
Pantagruel,  in  his  father  Gargantua,  and  in 
his  follower  and  boon-companion,  Panurge, 
one  can  discern  the  spirit  of  the  Renaissance 
— expansive,  humorous,  powerful,  and,  above 
all  else,  alive.  Rabelais'  book  is  the  incarna- 
tion of  the  great  reaction  of  his  epoch  against 
the  superstitious  gloom  and  the  narrow  asceti- 
cism of  the  Middle  Ages.  He  proclaims,  in 
his  rich  re-echoing  voice,  a  new  conception  of 
the  world;  he  denies  that  it  is  the  vale  of  sor- 
rows envisioned  by  the  teachers  of  the  past; 
he  declares  that  it  is  abounding  in  glorious 
energy,  abounding  in  splendid  hope,  and,  by 
its  very  nature,  good.  With  a  generous 
hatred  of  stupidity,  he  flies  full  tilt  at  the 
pedantic  education  of  the  monasteries,  and 
asserts  the  highest  ideals  of  science  and 
humanity.  With  an  equal  loathing  of  asceti- 
cism, he  satirises  the  monks  themselves, 
and  sketches  out,  in  his  description  of  the 


36  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

abbey  of  Theleme,  a  glowing  vision  of  the 
Utopian  convent.  His  thought  was  bold; 
but  he  lived  in  a  time  when  the  mildest 
speculation  was  fraught  with  danger;  and  he 
says  what  he  has  to  say  in  the  shifting  and 
ambiguous  forms  of  jest  and  allegory.  Yet 
it  was  by  no  means  simply  for  the  sake  of 
concealment  that  he  made  his  work  into  the 
singular  mixture  that  it  is,  of  rambling  narra- 
tive, disconnected  incident,  capricious  dis- 
quisition, and  coarse  humour.  That,  no 
doubt,  was  the  very  manner  in  which  his  mind 
worked;  and  the  essential  element  of  his 
spirit  resides  precisely  in  this  haphazard 
and  various  looseness.  His  exceeding  coarse- 
ness is  itself  an  expression  of  one  of  the 
most  fundamental  qualities  of  his  mind — its 
jovial  acceptance  of  the  physical  facts  of 
life.  Another  side  of  the  same  characteristic 
appears  in  his  glorification  of  eating  and 
drinking:  such  things  were  part  of  the  natural 
constitution  of  man,  therefore  let  man  enjoy 
them  to  the  full.  Who  knows?  Perhaps  the 
Riddle  of  the  Universe  would  be  solved  by 
the  oracle  of  la  dive  Bouteille. 

Rabelais'  book  is  a  history  of  giants,  and 
it  is  itself  gigantic;  it  is  as  broad  as  Gargantua 
himself.  It  seems  to  belong  to  the  morning 
of  the  world — a  time  of  mirth,  and  a  time  of 


THE  RENAISSANCE  37 

expectation;  when  the  earth  was  teeming 
with  a  miraculous  richness,  and  the  gods 
walked  among  men. 

In  the  Essays  of  MONTAIGNE,  written  about 
a  generation  later,  the  spirit  of  the  Renais- 
sance, which  had  filled  the  pages  of  Rabelais 
with  such  a  superabundant  energy,  appears 
in  a  quieter  and  more  cultivated  form.  The 
first  fine  rapture  was  over;  and  the  impulsive 
ardours  of  creative  thought  were  replaced  by 
the  calm  serenity  of  criticism  and  reflection. 
Montaigne  has  none  of  the  coarseness,  none 
of  the  rollicking  fun,  none  of  the  exuberant 
optimism,  of  Rabelais;  he  is  a  refined  gentle- 
man, who  wishes  to  charm  rather  than  to, 
electrify,  who  writes  in  the  quiet,  easy  tone 
of  familiar  conversation,  who  smiles,  who 
broods,  and  who  doubts.  The  form  of  the 
detached  essay,  which  he  was  the  first  to  use, 
precisely  suited  his  habit  of  thought.  In 
that  loose  shape — admitting  of  the  most 
indefinite  structure,  and  of  any  variety  of 
length,  from  three  pages  to  three  hundred — 
he  could  say  all  that  he  wished  to  say,  in  his 
own  desultory,  inconsecutive,  and  unelaborate 
manner.  His  book  flows  on  like  a  prattling 
brook,  winding  through  pleasant  meadows. 
Everywhere  the  fruits  of  wide  reading  are 


38  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

manifest,  and  numberless  Latin  quotations 
strew  his  pages.  He  touches  on  every  side 
of  life — from  the  slightest  and  most  super- 
ficial topics  of  literature  or  manners  to  the 
profoundest  questions  that  beset  humanity; 
and  always  with  the  same  tact  and  happiness, 
the  same  wealth  of  learned  illustration,  the 
same  engaging  grace. 

The  Essays  are  concerned  fundamentally 
with  two  subjects  only.  First,  they  illustrate 
in  every  variety  of  way  Montaigne's  general 
philosophy  of  life.  That  philosophy  was  an 
absolutely  sceptical  one.  Amid  the  mass  of 
conflicting  opinions,  amid  the  furious  opposi- 
tions of  creeds,  amid  the  flat  contradictions  of 
loudly  asseverated  dogmas,  Montaigne  held  a 
middle  course  of  calm  neutrality.  Que  sgais-je  ? 
was  his  constant  motto;  and  his  Essays 
are  a  collection  of  numberless  variations  on 
this  one  dominating  theme.  The  Apologie 
de  Raimond  Sebond,  the  largest  and  the  most 
elaborate  of  them,  contains  an  immense  and 
searching  review  of  the  errors,  the  incoher- 
ences, and  the  ignorance  of  humanity,  from 
which  Montaigne  draws  his  inevitable  con- 
clusion of  universal  doubt.  Whatever  the 
purely  philosophical  value  of  this  doctrine 
may  be,  its  importance  as  an  influence  in 
practical  life  was  very  great.  If  no  opinion 


THE  RENAISSANCE  39 

had  any  certainty  whatever,  then  it  followed 
that  persecution  for  the  sake  of  opinion 
was  simply  a  wicked  folly.  Montaigne  thus 
stands  out  as  one  of  the  earliest  of  the 
opponents  of  fanaticism  and  the  apostles 
of  toleration  in  the  history  of  European 
thought. 

The  other  subject  treated  of  in  the  Essays, 
with  an  equal  persistence  and  an  equal  wealth 
of  illustration,  is  Montaigne  himself.  The 
least  reticent  of  writers,  he  furnishes  his 
readers  with  every  conceivable  piece  of  in- 
formation concerning  his  history,  his  charac- 
ter, his  appearance,  his  health,  his  habits,  and 
his  tastes.  Here  lies  the  peculiar  charm  of  his 
book — the  endless  garrulity  of  its  confi- 
dences, which,  with  their  combined  humour, 
suavity,  and  irresponsibility,  bring  one  right 
into  the  intimate  presence  of  a  fascinating 
man. 

For  this  reason,  doubtless,  no  writer  has 
ever  been  so  gushed  over  as  Montaigne;  and 
no  writer,  we  may  be  sure,  would  be  so  horri- 
fied as  he  at  such  a  treatment.  Indeed,  the 
adulation  of  his  worshippers  has  perhaps 
somewhat  obscured  the  real  position  that  he 
fills  in  literature.  It  is  impossible  to  deny 
that,  both  as  a  writer  and  as  a  thinker,  he 
has  faults — and  grave  ones.  His  style,  with 


40  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

all  its  delightful  abundance,  its  inimitable 
ease,  and  its  pleasant  flavour  of  antiquity, 
yet  lacks  form;  he  did  not  possess  the  su- 
preme mastery  of  language  which  alone  can 
lead  to  the  creation  of  great  works  of  literary 
art.  His  scepticism  is  not  important  as  a  con- 
tribution to  philosophical  thought,  for  his 
mind  was  devoid  both  of  the  method  and  of 
the  force  necessary  for  the  pursuit  and  dis- 
covery of  really  significant  intellectual  truths. 
To  claim  for  him  such  titles  of  distinction  is  to 
overshoot  the  mark,  and  to  distract  atten- 
tion from  his  true  eminence.  Montaigne  was 
neither  a  great  artist  nor  a  great  philosopher; 
he  was  not  great  at  all.  He  was  a  charming, 
admirable  human  being,  with  the  most  en- 
gaging gift  for  conversing  endlessly  and  con- 
fidentially through  the  medium  of  the  printed 
page  ever  possessed  by  any  man  before  or 
after  him.  Even  in  his  self-revelations  he  is 
not  profound.  How  superficial,  how  insigni- 
ficant his  rambling  ingenuous  outspokenness 
appears  beside  the  tremendous  introspections 
of  Rousseau !  He  was  probably  a  better  man 
than  Rousseau;  he  was  certainly  a  more 
delightful  one;  but  he  was  far  less  interesting. 
It  was  in  the  gentle,  personal,  everyday 
things  of  life  that  his  nature  triumphed. 
Here  and  there  in  his  Essays,  this  simple 


THE  RENAISSANCE  41 

goodness  wells  up  clear  and  pure;  and  in  the 
wonderful  pages  on  Friendship,  one  sees,  in 
all  its  charm  and  all  its  sweetness,  that  beau- 
tiful humanity  which  is  the  inward  essence 
of  Montaigne. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  AGE  OF   TRANSITION 

IN  the  seventy  years  that  elapsed  between 
the  death  of  Montaigne  (1592)  and  the  acces- 
sion to  power  of  Louis  XIV,  the  tendencies  in 
French  literature  were  fluctuating  and  un- 
certain. It  was  a  period  of  change,  of  hesi- 
tation, of  retrogression  even;  and  yet,  below 
these  doubtful,  conflicting  movements,  a 
great  new  development  was  germinating, 
slowly,  surely,  and  almost  unobserved.  From 
one  point  of  view,  indeed,  this  age  may  be 
considered  the  most  important  in  the  whole 
history  of  the  literature,  since  it  prepared  the 
way  for  the  most  splendid  and  characteristic 
efflorescence  in  prose  and  poetry  that  France 
has  ever  known;  without  it,  there  would 
have  been  no  Grand  Siecle.  In  fact,  it  was 
during  this  age  that  the  conception  was 
gradually  evolved  which  determined  the  lines 
upon  which  all  French  literature  in  the  future 
was  to  advance.  It  can  hardly  be  doubted 
that  if  the  fertile  and  varied  Renaissance 
movement,  which  had  given  birth  to  the 

42 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          43 

PUiade,  to  Rabelais,  and  to  Montaigne,  had 
continued  to  progress  unbroken  and  un- 
checked, the  future  literature  of  France  would 
have  closely  resembled  the  contemporary 
literatures  of  Spain  and  England — that  it 
would  have  continued  to  be  characterised 
by  the  experimental  boldness  and  the, loose 
exuberance  of  the  masters  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  But  in  France  the  movement  was 
checked;  and  the  result  was  a  body  of  litera- 
ture, not  only  of  the  highest  value,  but  also 
of  a  unique  significance  in  European  letters. 
The  break  in  the  Renaissance  movement 
was  largely  the  result  of  political  causes. 
The  stability  and  peace  which  seemed  to  be  so 
firmly  established  by  the  brilliant  monarchy 
of  Francis  I  vanished  with  the  terrible  out- 
break of  the  Wars  of  Religion.  For  about 
sixty  years,  with  a  few  intermissions,  the 
nation  was  a  prey  to  the  horrors  of  civil  strife. 
And  when  at  last  order  was  restored  under 
the  powerful  rule  of  Cardinal  Richelieu,  and 
the  art  of  writing  began  to  be  once  more 
assiduously  practised,  the  fresh  rich  glory  of 
the  Renaissance  spirit  had  irrevocably  passed 
away.  Already,  early  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  the  poetry  of  MALHERBE  had  given 
expression  to  new  theories  and  new  ideals. 
A  man  of  powerful  though  narrow  intelligence, 


44  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

a  passionate  theorist,  and  an  ardent  specialist 
in  grammar  and  the  use  of  words,  Malherbe 
reacted  violently  both  against  the  misplaced 
and  artificial  erudition  of  the  PUiade  and 
their  unforced  outbursts  of  lyric  song.  His 
object  was  to  purify  the  French  tongue;  to 
make  it — even  at  the  cost  of  diminishing  its 
flavour  and  narrowing  its  range — strong,  sup- 
ple, accurate,  and  correct;  to  create  a  language 
which,  though  it  might  be  incapable  of  ex- 
pressing the  fervours  of  personal  passion  or 
the  airy  fancies  of  dreamers,  would  be  a  per- 
fect instrument  for  the  enunciation  of  noble 
truths  and  fine  imaginations,  in  forms  at  once 
simple,  splendid,  and  sincere.  Malherbe's  im- 
portance lies  rather  in  his  influence  than  in 
his  actual  work.  Some  of  his  Odes — among 
which  his  great  address  to  Louis  XIII  on  the 
rebellion  of  La  Rochelle  deserves  the  highest 
place — are  admirable  examples  of  a  restrained, 
measured,  and  weighty  rhetoric,  moving  to  the 
music  not  of  individual  emotion,  but  of  a  gen- 
eralised feeling  for  the  beauty  and  grandeur 
of  high  thoughts.  He  was  essentially  an  ora- 
torical poet;  but  unfortunately  the  only  forms 
of  verse  ready  to  his  hand  were  lyrical  forms; 
so  that  his  genius  never  found  a  full  scope  for 
its  powers.  Thus  his  precept  outweighs  his 
example.  His  poetical  theories  found  their 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION         45 

full  justification  only  in  the  work  of  his  greater 
and  more  fortunate  successors;  and  the 
masters  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV  looked  back 
to  Malherbe  as  the  intellectual  father  of  their 
race. 

Malherbe's  immediate  influence,  however, 
was  very  limited.  Upon  the  generation  of 
writers  that  followed  him,  his  doctrines  of 
sobriety  and  simplicity  made  no  impression 
whatever.  Their  tastes  lay  in  an  entirely 
different  direction.  For  now,  in  the  second 
quarter  of  the  seventeenth  century,  there  set 
in,  with  an  extreme  and  sudden  violence,  a 
fashion  for  every  kind  of  literary  contortion, 
affectation,  and  trick.  The  value  of  a  poet 
was  measured  by  his  capacity  for  turning  a 
somersault  in  verse — for  constructing  ingen- 
ious word-puzzles  with  which  to  express  ex- 
aggerated sentiments;  and  no  prose- writer 
was  worth  looking  at  who  could  not  drag  a 
complicated,  ramifying  simile  through  half-a- 
dozen  pages  at  least.  These  artificialities 
lacked  the  saving  grace  of  those  of  the  Renais- 
sance writers — their  abounding  vigour  and 
their  inventive  skill.  They  were  cold-blooded 
artificialities,  evolved  elaborately,  simply  for 
their  own  sake.  The  new  school,  with  its 
twisted  conceits  and  its  super-subtle  ele- 
gances, came  to  be  known  as  the  "Precious" 


46  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

school,  and  it  is  under  that  name  that  the 
satire  of  subsequent  writers  has  handed  it 
down  to  the  laughter  of  after-generations. 
Yet  a  perspicacious  eye  might  have  seen  even 
in  these  absurd  and  tasteless  productions  the 
signs  of  a  progressive  movement — the  possi- 
bility, at  least,  of  a  true  advance.  For  the 
contortions  of  the  "Precious"  writers  were 
less  the  result  of  their  inability  to  write  well 
than  of  their  desperate  efforts  to  do  so.  They 
were  trying,  as  hard  as  they  could,  to  wriggle 
themselves  into  a  beautiful  pose;  and,  natu- 
rally enough,  they  were  unsuccessful.  They 
were,  in  short,  too  self-conscious;  but  it  was 
in  this  very  self-consciousness  that  the  real 
hope  for  the  future  lay.  The  teaching  of  Mal- 
herbe,  if  it  did  not  influence  the  actual  form  of 
their  work,  at  least  impelled  them  towards  a 
deliberate  effort  to  produce  some  form,  and  to 
be  content  no  longer  with  the  vague  and  the 
haphazard.  In  two  directions  particularly 
this  new  self-consciousness  showed  itself.  It 
showed  itself  in  the  formation  of  literary 
salons — of  which  the  chief  was  the  famous 
blue  drawing-room  of  the  Hotel  de  Rambouil- 
let — where  every  conceivable  question  of 
taste  and  art,  grammar  and  vocabulary,  was 
discussed  with  passionate  intensity;  and  it 
showed  itself  even  more  strongly  in  the  estab- 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          47 

lishment,  under  the  influence  of  Richelieu, 
of  an  official  body  of  literary  experts — the 
French  Academy. 

How  far  the  existence  of  the  Academy  has 
influenced  French  literature,  either  for  good 
or  for  evil,  is  an  extremely  dubious  question. 
It  was  formed  for  the  purpose  of  giving  fixity 
and  correctness  to  the  language,  of  preserving 
a  high  standard  of  literary  taste,  and  of  creat- 
ing an  authoritative  centre  from  which  the 
ablest  men  of  letters  of  the  day  should  radiate 
their  influence  over  the  country.  To  a  great 
extent  these  ends  have  been  attained;  but 
they  have  been  accompanied  by  correspond- 
ing drawbacks.  Such  an  institution  must 
necessarily  be  a  conservative  one;  and  it  is 
possible  that  the  value  of  the  Academy  as  a 
centre  of  purity  and  taste  has  been  at  least 
balanced  by  the  extreme  reluctance  which  it 
has  always  shown  to  countenance  any  of  those 
forms  of  audacity  and  change  without  which 
no  literature  can  be  saved  from  petrifaction. 
All  through  its  history  the  Academy  has  been 
timid  and  out  of  date.  The  result  has  been 
that  some  of  the  very  greatest  of  French 
writers — including  Moliere,  Diderot,  and 
Flaubert — have  remained  outside  it;  while 
all  the  most  fruitful  developments  in  French 
literary  theory  have  come  about  only  after  a 


48  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

bitter  and  desperate  resistance  on  its  part. 
On  the  whole,  perhaps  the  most  important 
function  performed  by  the  Academy  has  been 
a  more  indirect  one.  The  mere  existence  of  a 
body  of  writers  officially  recognised  by  the 
authorities  of  the  State  has  undoubtedly 
given  a  peculiar  prestige  to  the  profession  of 
letters  in  France.  It  has  emphasised  that  ten- 
dency to  take  the  art  of  writing  seriously — to 
regard  it  as  a  fit  object  for  the  most  conscien- 
tious craftsmanship  and  deliberate  care — 
which  is  so  characteristic  of  French  writers. 
The  amateur  is  very  rare  in  French  literature 
— as  rare  as  he  is  common  in  our  own.  How 
many  of  the  greatest  English  writers  would 
have  denied  that  they  were  men  of  letters! — 
Scott,  Byron,  Gray,  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  per- 
haps even  Shakespeare  himself.  When  Con- 
greve  begged  Voltaire  not  to  talk  of  literature, 
but  to  regard  him  merely  as  an  English  gentle- 
man, the  French  writer,  who,  in  all  his  multi- 
farious activities,  never  forgot  for  a  moment 
that  he  was  first  and  foremost  a  follower  of  the 
profession  of  letters,  was  overcome  with  as- 
tonishment and  disgust.  The  difference  is 
typical  of  the  attitude  of  the  two  nations  / 
towards  literature:  the  English,  throwing  off 
their  glorious  masterpieces  by  the  way,  as  if 
they  were  trifles;  and  the  French  bending  all 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          49 

the  resources  of  a  trained  and  patient  energy 
to  the  construction  and  the  perfection  of  mar- 
vellous works  of  art. 

Whatever  view  we  may  take  of  the  ultimate 
influence  of  the  French  Academy,  there  can 
be  no  doubt  at  all  that  one  of  its  first  actions 
was  singularly  inauspicious.  Under  the  guid> 
ance  of  Cardinal  Richelieu  it  delivered  a  futile 
attack  upon  the  one  writer  of  the  time  who 
stood  out  head  and  shoulders  above  his  con- 
temporaries, and  whose  works  bore  all  the 
marks  of  unmistakable  genius — the  great 
CORNEILLE.  With  the  production,  in  1636, 
of  Corneille's  tragedy,  Le  Cid,  modern  French 
drama  came  into  existence.  Previous  to  that 
date,  two  main  movements  are  discernible  in 
French  dramatic  art — one  carrying  on  the 
medieval  traditions  of  the  mystery-  and 
miracle-play,  and  culminating,  early  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  with  the  rough,  vigorous 
and  popular  drama  of  Hardy;  and  the  other, 
originating  with  the  writers  of  the  Renais- 
sance, and  leading  to  the  production  of  a 
number  of  learned  and  literary  plays,  com- 
posed in  strict  imitation  of  the  tragedies  of 
Seneca, — plays  of  which  the  typical  represen- 
tative is  the  Cleopdtre  of  Jodelle.  Corneille's 
achievement  was  based  upon  a  combination 
of  what  was  best  in  these  two  movements. 


50  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

The  work  of  Jodelle,  written  with  a  genuinely 
artistic  intention,  was  nevertheless  a  dead 
thing  on  the  stage;  while  Hardy's  melo- 
dramas, bursting  as  they  were  with  vitality, 
were  too  barbaric  to  rank  as  serious  works  of 
art.  Corneille  combined  art  with  vitality,  and 
for  the  first  time  produced  a  play  which  was 
at  once  a  splendid  piece  of  literature  and  an 
immense  popular  success.  Henceforward  it 
was  certain  that  French  drama  would  develop 
along  the  path  which  had  been  opened  out  for 
it  so  triumphantly  by  the  Cid.  But  what  was 
that  path?  Nothing  shows  more  strikingly 
the  strength  of  the  literary  opinion  of  that  age 
than  the  fact  that  it  was  able  to  impose  itself 
even  upon  the  mighty  and  towering  spirit  of 
Corneille.  By  nature,  there  can  be  little 
doubt  that  Corneille  was  a  romantic.  His 
fiery  energy,  his  swelling  rhetoric,  his  love  of 
the  extraordinary  and  the  sublime,  bring  him 
into  closer  kinship  with  Marlowe  than  with 
any  other  writer  of  his  own  nation  until  the 
time  of  Victor  Hugo.  But  Corneille  could 
not  do  what  Marlowe  did.  He  could  not 
infuse  into  the  free  form  of  popular  drama  the 
passion  and  splendour  of  his  own  genius,  and 
thus  create  a  type  of  tragedy  that  was  at  once 
exuberant  and  beautiful.  And  he  could  not 
do  this  because  the  literary  theories  of  the 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          51 

whole  of  the  cultivated  society  of  France 
would  have  been  opposed  to  him,  because  he 
himself  was  so  impregnated  with  those  very 
theories  that  he  failed  to  realise  where  the  true 
bent  of  his  genius  lay.  Thus  it  was  that  the 
type  of  drama  which  he  impressed  upon 
French  literature  was  not  the  romantic  type 
of  the  English  Elizabethans,  but  the  classical 
type  of  Senecan  tragedy  which  Jodelle  had 
imitated,  and  which  was  alone  tolerable  to  the 
French  critics  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
Instead  of  making  the  vital  drama  of  Hardy 
artistic,  he  made  the  literary  drama  of  Jodelle 
alive.  Probably  it  was  fortunate  that  he  did 
so;  for  he  thus  led  the  way  straight  to  the 
most  characteristic  product  of  the  French 
genius — the  tragedy  of  Racine.  With  Racine, 
the  classical  type  of  drama,  which  so  ill  be- 
fitted the  romantic  spirit  of  Corneille,  found 
its  perfect  exponent;  and  it  will  be  well  there- 
fore to  postpone  a  more  detailed  examination 
of  the  nature  of  that  type  until  we  come  to 
consider  Racine  himself,  the  value  of  whose 
work  is  inextricably  interwoven  with  its  form. 
The  dominating  qualities  of  Corneille  may  be 
more  easily  appreciated. 

He  was  above  all  things  a  rhetorician;  he 
was  an  instinctive  master  of  those  qualities 
in  words  which  go  to  produce  effects  of 


52  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

passionate  vehemence,  vigorous  precision,  and 
culminating  force.  His  great  tirades  carry 
forward  the  reader,  or  the  listener  (for  indeed 
the  verse  of  Corneille  loses  hah*  its  value  when 
it  is  unheard),  on  a  full-flowing  tide  of  lan- 
guage, where  the  waves  of  the  verse,  follow- 
ing one  another  in  a  swift  succession  of  ever- 
rising  power,  crash  down  at  last  with  a  roar. 
It  is  a  strange  kind  of  poetry:  not  that  of 
imaginative  vision,  of  plastic  beauty,  of 
subtle  feeling;  but  that  of  intellectual 
excitement  and  spiritual  strength.  It  is  the 
poetry  of  Malherbe  multiplied  a  thousand- 
fold in  vigour  and  in  genius,  and  expressed  in 
the  form  most  appropriate  to  it — the  dra- 
matic Alexandrine  verse.  The  stuff  out  of 
which  it  is  woven,  made  up,  not  of  the  images 
of  sense,  but  of  the  processes  of  thought,  is, 
in  fact,  simply  argument.  One  can  under- 
stand how  verse  created  from  such  material 
might  be  vigorous  and  impressive;  it  is 
difficult  to  imagine  how  it  could  also  be 
passionate — until  one  has  read  Corneille. 
Then  one  realises  afresh  the  compelling  power 
of  genius.  His  tragic  personages,  standing 
forth  without  mystery,  without  "atmos- 
phere," without  local  colour,  but  simply  in 
the  clear  white  light  of  reason,  rivet  our 
attention,  and  seem  at  last  to  seize  upon 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          53 

our  very  souls.  Their  sentences,  balanced, 
weighty,  and  voluble,  reveal  the  terrors  of 
destiny,  the  furies  of  love,  the  exasperations 
of  pride,  with  an  intensity  of  intellectual 
precision  that  burns  and  blazes.  The  deeper 
these  strange  beings  sink  into  their  anguish, 
the  more  remorseless  their  arguments  become. 
They  prove  their  horror  in  dreadful  syllo- 
gisms; every  inference  plunges  them  farther 
into  the  abyss;  and  their  intelligence  flames 
upward  to  its  highest  point,  when  they  are 
finally  engulfed. 

Such  is  the  singular  passion  that  fills  Cor- 
neille's  tragedies.  The  creatures  that  give 
utterance  to  it  are  hardly  human  beings: 
they  are  embodiments  of  will,  force,  intellect, 
and  pride.  The  situations  in  which  they  are 
placed  are  calculated  to  expose  these  qualities 
to  the  utmost;  and  all  Corneille's  master- 
pieces are  concerned  with  the  same  subject — 
the  combat  between  indomitable  egoism  and 
the  forces  of  Fate.  It  is  in  the  meeting 
of  these  "fell  incensed  opposites"  that  the 
tragedy  consists.  In  Le  Cid  Chimene's  pas- 
sion for  Rodrigue  struggles  in  a  death- 
grapple  with  the  destiny  that  makes  Rodrigue 
the  slayer  of  her  father.  In  Polyeucte  it  is 
the  same  passion  struggling  with  the  dictates 
of  religion.  In  Les  Horaces,  patriotism, 


54  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

family  love,  and  personal  passion  are  all 
pitted  against  Fate.  In  Cinna,  the  conflict 
passes  within  the  mind  of  Auguste,  between 
the  promptings  of  a  noble  magnanimity  and 
the  desire  for  revenge.  In  all  these  plays  the 
central  characters  display  a  superhuman 
courage  and  constancy  and  self-control. 
They  are  ideal  figures,  speaking  with  a  force 
and  an  elevation  unknown  in  actual  experi- 
ence; they  never  blench,  they  never  waver, 
but  move  adamantine  to  their  doom.  They 
are  for  ever  asserting  the  strength  of  their 
own  individuality. 

"  Je  suis  maitre  de  moi  comme  de  1'univers, 
Je  le  suis,  je  veux  1'etre," 

declares  Auguste;  and  Medee,  at  the  climax 
of  her  misfortunes,  uses  the  same  language — 

"'Dans  un  si  grand  revers  que  vous  reste- 

t-il?'— 'Moi! 
Moi,  dis-je,  et  c'est  assez ! ' ' 

The  word  "moi "  dominates  these  tragedies; 
and  their  heroes,  bursting  with  this  extraor- 
dinary egoism,  assume  even  more  tower- 
ing proportions  in  their  self-abnegation  than 
in  their  pride.  Then  the  thrilling  clarion- 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          55 

notes  of  their  defiances  give  way  to  the  deep 
grand  music  of  stern  sublimity  and  stoic 
resignation.  The  gigantic  spirit  recoils  upon 
itself,  crushes  itself,  and  reaches  its  last 
triumph. 

Drama  of  this  kind  must,  it  is  clear,  lack 
many  of  the  qualities  which  are  usually 
associated  with  the  dramatic  art;  there  is  no 
room  in  it  for  variety  of  character-drawing,  for 
delicacy  of  feeling,  or  for  the  realistic  presen- 
tation of  the  experiences  of  life.  Corneille 
hardly  attempted  to  produce  such  effects  as 
these;  and  during  his  early  years  his  great 
gifts  .of  passion  and  rhetoric  easily  made  up 
for  the  deficiency.  As  he  grew  older,  however, 
his  inspiration  weakened;  his  command  of 
his  material  left  him;  and  he  was  no  longer 
able  to  fill  the  figures  of  his  creation  with  the 
old  intellectual  sublimity.  His  heroes  and 
his  heroines  became  mere  mouthing  puppets, 
pouring  out  an  endless  stream  of  elaborate, 
high-flown  sentiments,  wrapped  up  in  a  com- 
plicated jargon  of  argumentative  verse.  His 
later  plays  are  miserable  failures.  Not  only 
do  they  illustrate  the  inherent  weaknesses  of 
Corneille's  dramatic  method,  but  they  are 
also  full  of  the  characteristic  bad  taste  and 
affectations  of  the  age.  The  vital  spirit  once 
withdrawn,  out  sprang  the  noisome  creatures 


56  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

from  their  lurking-places  to  feast  upon  the 
corpse. 

Nevertheless,  with  all  his  faults,  Corneille 
dominated  French  literature  for  twenty  years. 
His  genius,  transcendent,  unfortunate,  noble 
in  endeavour,  unequal  in  accomplishment, 
typifies  the  ambiguous  movement  of  the  time. 
For  still  the  flood  of  "Precious"  literature 
poured  from  the  press — dull,  contorted  epics, 
and  stilted  epigrams  on  my  lady's  eyebrow, 
and  learned  dissertations  decked  out  in 
sparkling  tinsel,  and  infinitely  long  romances, 
full  of  alembicated  loves.  Then  suddenly  one 
day  a  small  pamphlet  in  the  form  of  a  letter 
appeared  on  the  bookstalls  of  Paris;  and  with 
its  appearance  the  long  reign  of  confused 
ideals  and  misguided  efforts  came  to  an  end 
for  ever.  The  pamphlet  was  the  first  of 
Pascal's  Lettres  Provinciates — the  work  which 
ushered  into  being  the  great  classical  age — 
the  Grand  Siecle  of  Louis  XIV. 

In  the  Lettres  Provinciates  PASCAL  created 
French  prose — the  French  prose  that  we  know 
to-day,  the  French  prose  which  ranks  by 
virtue  of  its  vigour,  elegance,  and  precision  as 
a  unique  thing  in  the  literature  of  the  world. 
Earlier  prose  writers — Joinville,  Froissart, 
Rabelais,  Montaigne — had  been  in  turns 
charming,  or  picturesque,  or  delicate,  or  over- 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          57 

flowing  with  vitality;  but  none  had  struck 
upon  the  really  characteristically  French  note. 
They  lacked  form,  and  those  fine  qualities  of 
strength  and  clarity  which  form  alone  can 
give.  Their  sentences  were  indeterminate — 
long,  complex,  drifting,  and  connected  to- 
gether by  conjunctions  into  a  loose  aggregate. 
The  "Precious"  writers  had  dimly  realised 
the  importance  of  form,  but  they  had  not 
realised  at  all  the  importance  of  simplicity. 
This  was  Pascal's  great  discovery.  His  sen- 
tences are  clear,  straightforward,  and  distinct; 
and  they  are  bound  together  into  a  succession 
of  definitely  articulated  paragraphs,  which  are 
constructed,  not  on  the  system  of  mere 
haphazard  aggregation,  but  according  to  the 
logical  development  of  the  thought.  Thus 
Pascal's  prose,  like  the  verse  of  Malherbe  and 
Corneille,  is  based  upon  reason;  it  is  primarily 
intellectual.  But,  with  Pascal,  the  intellect 
expresses  itself  even  more  exactly.  The  last 
vestiges  of  medieval  ambiguities  have  been 
discarded;  the  style  is  perfectly  modern.  So 
wonderfully  did  Pascal  master  the  resources 
of  the  great  instrument  which  he  had  forged, 
that  it  is  true  to  say  that  no  reader  who  wishes 
to  realise  once  for  all  the  great  qualities  of 
French  prose  could  do  better  than  turn  straight 
to  the  Lettres  Provinciates.  Here  he  will  find 


58  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  lightness  and  the  strength,  the  exquisite 
polish  and  the  delicious  wit,  the  lambent  irony 
and  the  ordered  movement,  which  no  other 
language  spoken  by  man  has  ever  quite  been 
able  to  produce.  The  Letters  are  a  work  of 
controversy;  their  actual  subject-matter — 
the  ethical  system  of  the  Jesuits  of  the  time — 
is  remote  from  modern  interests;  yet  such  is 
the  brilliance  of  Pascal's  art  that  every  page 
of  them  is  fascinating  to-day.  The  vivacity 
of  the  opening  letters  is  astonishing;  the  tone 
is  the  gay,  easy  tone  of  a  man  of  the  world; 
the  attack  is  delivered  in  a  rushing  onslaught 
of  raillery.  Gradually,  as  the  book  proceeds, 
there  are  signs  of  a  growing  seriousness;  we 
have  a  sense  of  graver  issues,  and  round  the 
small  question  of  the  Jesuits'  morality  we 
discern  ranged  all  the  vast  forces  of  good  and 
evil.  At  last  the  veil  of  wit  and  laughter  is 
entirely  removed,  and  Pascal  bursts  forth  into 
the  full  fury  of  invective.  The  vials  of  wrath 
are  opened;  a  terrific  denunciation  rolls  out 
in  a  thundering  cataract;  and  at  the  close  of 
the  book  there  is  hardly  a  note  in  the  whole 
gamut  of  language,  from  the  airiest  badinage 
to  the  darkest  objurgation,  which  has  not  been 
touched. 

In  sheer  genius  Pascal  ranks  among  the 
very  greatest  writers  who  have  lived  upon  this 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          59 

earth.  And  his  genius  was  not  simply  artistic; 
it  displayed  itself  no  less  in  his  character  and 
in  the  quality  of  his  thought.  These  are  the 
sides  of  him  which  are  revealed  with  extraor- 
dinary splendour  in  his  Pensees — a  collec- 
tion of  notes  intended  to  form  the  basis  for  an 
elaborate  treatise  in  defence  of  Christianity 
which  Pascal  did  not  live  to  complete.  The 
style  of  many  of  these  passages  surpasses  in 
brilliance  and  force  even  that  of  the  Lettres 
Provinciates.  In  addition,  one  hears  the 
intimate  voice  of  Pascal,  speaking  upon  the 
profoundest  problems  of  existence — the  most 
momentous  topics  which  can  agitate  the 
minds  of  men.  Two  great  themes  compose  his 
argument:  the  miserable  insignificance  of  all 
that  is  human — human  reason,  human  knowl- 
edge, human  ambition;  and  the  transcendent 
glory  of  God.  Never  was  the  wretchedness 
of  mankind  painted  with  a  more  passionate 
power.  The  whole  infinitude  of  the  physical 
universe  is  invoked  in  his  sweeping  sentences 
to  crush  the  presumption  of  man.  Man's 
intellectual  greatness  itself  he  seizes  upon  to 
point  the  moral  of  an  innate  contradiction, 
an  essential  imbecility.  "Quelle  chimere,"  he 
exclaims,  "est-ce  done  que  I'homme!  quelle 
nouveaute,  quel  monstre,  quel  chaos,  quel  su- 
jet  de  contradiction,  quel  prodige!  Juge  de 


60  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

toutes  choses,  imbecile  ver  de  terre,  deposi- 
taire  du  vrai,  cloaque  d'incertitude  et  d'erreur, 
gloire  et  rebut  de  1'univers!"  In  words  of 
imperishable  intensity,  he  dwells  upon  the 
omnipotence  of  Death.  "Nous  sommes  plai- 
sants  de  nous  reposer  dans  la  societe  de  nos 
semblables.  Miserables  comme  nous,  impuis- 
sants  comme  nous,  ils  ne  nous  aideront  pas; 
on  mourra  seul."  Or  he  summons  up  in  one 
ghastly  sentence  the  vision  of  the  inevitable 
end: — "Le  dernier  acte  est  sanglant,  quelque 
belle  que  soit  la  comedie  en  tout  le  reste.  On 
jette  enfin  de  la  terre  sur  la  tete,  et  en  voila 
pour  jamais."  And  so  follows  the  conclusion 
of  the  whole: — "Connaissez  done,  superbe, 
quel  paradoxe  vous  etes  a  vous-meme. 
Humiliez-vous,  raison  impuissante;  taisez- 
vous,  nature  imbecile  .  .  .  et  entendez  de 
votre  maitre  votre  condition  veritable  que 
vous  ignorez.  Ecoutez  Dieu." 

Modern  as  the  style  of  Pascal's  writing  is, 
his  thought  is  deeply  impregnated  with  the 
spirit  of  the  Middle  Ages.  He  belonged, 
almost  equally,  to  the  future  and  to  the  past. 
He  was  a  distinguished  man  of  science,  a 
brilliant  mathematician;  yet  he  shrank  from 
a  consideration  of  the  theory  of  Copernicus: 
it  was  more  important,  he  declared,  to  think 
of  the  immortal  soul.  In  the  last  years  of  his 


THE  AGE  OF  TRANSITION          61 

short  life  he  sank  into  a  torpor  of  superstition 
— ascetic,  self -mortified,  and  rapt  in  a  strange 
exaltation,  like  a  medieval  monk.  Thus  there 
is  a  tragic  antithesis  in  his  character — an 
unresolved  discord  which  shows  itself  again 
and  again  in  his  Pensees.  "Condition  de 
Phomme,"  he  notes,  "  inconstance,  ennui, 
inquietude."  It  is  the  description  of  his  own 
state.  A  profound  inquietude  did  indeed 
devour  him.  He  turned  desperately  from  the 
pride  of  his  intellect  to  the  consolations  of  his 
religion.  But  even  there — ?  Beneath  him,  as 
he  sat  or  as  he  walked,  a  great  gulf  seemed  to 
open  darkly,  into  an  impenetrable  abyss.  He 
looked  upward  into  heaven,  and  the  familiar 
horror  faced  him  still. — "Le  silence  eternel  de 
ces  espaces  infinis  m'effraie!" 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV 

WHEN  Louis  XIV  assumed  the  reins  of 
government,  France  suddenly  and  wonder- 
fully came  to  her  maturity;  it  was  as  if  the 
whole  nation  had  burst  into  splendid  flower. 
In  every  branch  of  human  activity — in  war, 
in  administration,  in  social  life,  in  art,  and  in 
literature — the  same  energy  was  apparent, 
the  same  glorious  success.  At  a  bound 
France  won  the  headship  of  Europe;  and 
when  at  last,  defeated  in  arms  and  politically 
shattered,  she  was  forced  to  relinquish  her 
dreams  of  worldly  power,  her  pre-eminence 
in  the  arts  of  peace  remained  unshaken.  For 
more  than  a  century  she  continued,  through 
her  literature  and  her  manners,  to  dominate 
the  civilised  world. 

At  no  other  time  have  the  conditions  of 
society  exercised  a  more  profound  influence 
upon  the  works  of  great  writers.  Though, 
with  the  ascendancy  of  Louis,  the  political 
power  of  the  nobles  finally  came  to  an  end, 
France  remained,  in  the  whole  complexion 

62 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  63 

of  her  social  life,  completely  aristocratic. 
Louis,  with  deliberate  policy,  emphasised 
the  existing  rigidity  of  class-distinctions  by 
centralising  society  round  his  splendid  palace 
of  Versailles.  Versailles  is  the  clou  to  the 
age  of  Louis  XIV.  The  huge,  almost  infinite 
building,  so  stately  and  so  glorious,  with  its 
vast  elaborate  gardens,  its  great  trees  trans- 
ported from  distant  forests,  its  amazing 
waterworks  constructed  in  an  arid  soil  at  the 
cost  of  millions,  its  lesser  satellite  parks  and 
palaces,  its  palpitating  crowds  of  sumptuous 
courtiers,  the  whole  accumulated  mass  of 
piled-up  treasure  and  magnificence  and  power 
—this  was  something  far  more  significant 
than  the  mere  country  residence  of  royalty; 
it  was  the  summary,  the  crown,  and  the  visible 
expression  of  the  ideals  of  a  great  age.  And 
what  were  these  ideals?  The  fact  that  the 
conception  of  society  which  made  Versailles 
possible  was  narrow  and  unjust  must  not 
blind  us  to  the  real  nobility  and  the  real  glory 
which  it  brought  into  being.  It  is  true  that 
behind  and  beyond  the  radiance  of  Louis  and 
his  courtiers  lay  the  dark  abyss  of  an  impover- 
ished France,  a  ruined  peasantry,  a  whole 
system  of  intolerance,  and  privilege,  and 
maladministration ;  yet  it  is  none  the  less  true 
that  the  radiance  was  a  genuine  radiance — no 


64  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

false  and  feeble  glitter,  but  the  warm,  bril- 
liant, intense  illumination  thrown  out  by  the 
glow  of  a  nation's  life.  That  life,  with  all  it 
meant  to  those  who  lived  it,  has  long  since 
vanished  from  the  earth — preserved  to  us  now 
only  in  the  pages  of  its  poets,  or  strangely 
shadowed  forth  to  the  traveller  in  the  illimi- 
table desolation  of  Versailles.  That  it  has 
gone  so  utterly  is  no  doubt,  on  the  whole,  a 
cause  for  rejoicing;  but,  as  we  look  back  upon 
it,  we  may  still  feel  something  of  the  old 
enchantment,  and  feel  it,  perhaps,  the  more 
keenly  for  its  strangeness — its  dissimilarity 
to  the  experiences  of  our  own  days.  We  shall 
catch  glimpses  of  a  world  of  pomp  and  bril- 
liance, of  ceremony  and  decoration,  a  small, 
vital  passionate  world  which  has  clothed  itself 
in  ordered  beauty,  learnt  a  fine  way  of  easy, 
splendid  living,  and  come  under  the  spell 
of  a  devotion  to  what  is,  to  us,  no  more  than 
the  gorgeous  phantom  of  high  imaginations — 
the  divinity  of  a  king.  When  the  morning 
sun  was  up  and  the  horn  was  sounding  down 
the  long  avenues,  who  would  not  wish,  if  only 
in  fancy,  to  join  the  glittering  cavalcade 
where  the  young  Louis  led  the  hunt  in  the 
days  of  his  opening  glory?  Later,  we  might 
linger  on  the  endless  terrace,  to  watch  the 
great  monarch,  with  his  red  heels  and  his 


65 

golden  snuff-box  and  his  towering  periwig, 
come  out  among  his  courtiers,  or  in  some 
elaborate  grotto  applaud  a  ballet  by  Moliere. 
When  night  fell  there  would  be  dancing  and 
music  in  the  gallery  blazing  with  a  thousand 
looking-glasses,  or  masquerades  and  feasting 
in  the  gardens,  with  the  torches  throwing 
strange  shadows  among  the  trees  trimmed 
into  artificial  figures,  and  gay  lords  and  proud 
ladies  conversing  together  under  the  stars. 

Such  were  the  surroundings  among  which 
the  classical  literature  of  France  came  into 
existence,  and  by  which  it  was  profoundly 
influenced  in  a  multitude  of  ways.  This 
literature  was,  in  its  form  and  its  essence, 
aristocratic  literature,  though  its  writers  were, 
almost  without  exception,  middle-class  men 
brought  into  prominence  by  the  royal  favour. 
The  great  dramatists  and  poets  and  prose- 
writers  of  the  epoch  were  in  the  position  of 
artists  working  by  special  permission  for  the 
benefit  and  pleasure  of  a  select  public  to  which 
they  themselves  had  no  claim  to  belong. 
They  were  in  the  world  of  high  birth  and 
splendid  manners,  but  they  were  not  of  it; 
and  thus  it  happened  that  their  creations, 
while  reflecting  what  was  finest  in  the  social 
ideals  of  the  time,  escaped  the  worst  faults  of 
the  literary  productions  of  persons  of  rank 


66  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

— superficiality  and  amateurishness.  The 
literature  of  that  age  was,  in  fact,  remarkable 
to  an  extraordinary  degree  for  precisely 
contrary  qualities — for  the  solidity  of  its 
psychological  foundations  and  for  the  supreme 
excellence  of  its  craftsmanship.  It  was  the 
work  of  profound  and  subtle  artists  writing 
for  a  small,  leisured,  distinguished,  and  critical 
audience,  while  retaining  the  larger  outlook 
and  sense  of  proportion  which  had  come  to 
them  from  their  own  experience  of  life. 

The  fact,  too,  that  this  aristocratic  audience 
was  no  longer  concerned  with  the  activities 
of  political  power,  exercised  a  further  influence 
upon  the  writers  of  the  age.  The  old  interests 
of  aristocracy — the  romance  of  action,  the 
exalted  passions  of  chivalry  and  war — faded 
into  the  background,  and  their  place  was 
taken  by  the  refined  and  intimate  pursuits  of 
peace  and  civilisation.  The  exquisite  letters 
of  Madame  de  Sevigne  show  us  society  as- 
suming its  modern  complexion,  women  becom- 
ing the  arbiters  of  taste  and  fashion,  and 
drawing-rooms  the  centre  of  life.  These  ten- 
dencies were  reflected  in  literature;  and 
Corneille's  tragedies  of  power  were  replaced 
by  Racine's  tragedies  of  the  heart.  Nor  was 
it  only  in  the  broad  outlines  that  the  change 
was  manifest;  the  whole  temper  of  life,  in  all 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  67 

its  details,  took  on  the  suave,  decorous, 
dignified  tone  of  good  breeding,  and  it  was 
impossible  that  men  of  letters  should  escape 
the  infection.  Their  works  became  remark- 
able for  clarity  and  elegance,  for  a  graceful 
simplicity,  an  easy  strength;  they  were  cast 
in  the  fine  mould  of  perfect  manners — majes- 
tic without  pretension,  expressive  without 
emphasis,  simple  without  carelessness,  and 
subtle  without  affectation.  These  are  the 
dominating  qualities  in  the  style  of  that 
great  body  of  literature,  which  has  rightly 
come  to  be  distinguished  as  the  Classical 
literature  of  France. 

Yet  there  was  a  reverse  to  the  medal;  for 
such  qualities  necessarily  involved  defects, 
which,  hardly  perceptible  and  of  small  im- 
portance in  the  work  of  the  early  masters 
of  the  Classical  school,  became  more  promi- 
nent in  the  hands  of  lesser  men,  and  eventu- 
ally brought  the  whole  tradition  into  dis- 
repute. It  was  inevitable  that  there  should 
be  a  certain  narrowness  in  a  literature  which 
was  in  its  very  essence  deliberate,  refined, 
and  select;  omission  is  the  beginning  of  all 
art;  and  the  great  French  classicists,  more 
supremely  artistic,  perhaps,  than  any  other 
body  of  writers  in  the  history  of  the  world, 
practised  with  unsparing  devotion  the  virtue 


68  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

of  leaving  out.  The  beauties  of  clarity, 
simplicity,  and  ease  were  what  they  aimed 
at;  and  to  attain  them  involved  the  aban- 
donment of  other  beauties  which,  however 
attractive,  were  incompatible  with  those. 
Vague  suggestion,  complexity  of  thought, 
strangeness  of  imagination — to  us  the  familiar 
ornaments  of  poetry — were  qualities  eschewed 
by  the  masters  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV. 
They  were  willing  to  forgo  comprehensive- 
ness and  elaboration,  they  were  ready  to 
forswear  the  great  effects  of  curiosity  and 
mystery;  for  the  pursuit  of  these  led  away 
from  the  high  path  of  their  chosen  endeavour 
— the  creation,  within  the  limits  they  had 
marked  out,  of  works  of  flawless  art.  The 
fact  that  they  succeeded  so  well  is  precisely 
one  of  the  reasons  why  it  is  difficult  for  the 
modern  reader — and  for  the  Anglo-Saxon 
one  especially,  with  his  different  aesthetic 
traditions — to  appreciate  their  work  to  the 
full.  To  us,  with  our  broader  outlook,  our 
more  complicated  interests,  our  more  elusive 
moods,  their  small  bright  world  is  apt  to 
seem  uninteresting  and  out  of  date,  unless 
we  spend  some  patient  sympathy  in  the 
discovery  of  the  real  charm  and  the  real 
beauty  that  it  contains.  Nor  is  this  our  only 
difficulty:  the  classical  tradition,  like  all 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  69 

traditions,  became  degenerate;  its  virtues 
hardened  into  mannerisms,  its  weaknesses 
expanded  into  dogmas;  and  it  is  sometimes 
hard  for  us  to  discriminate  between  the  artist 
who  has  mastered  the  convention  in  which 
he  works,  and  the  artisan  who  is  the  slave 
of  it.  The  convention  itself,  if  it  is  unfamiliar 
to  us,  is  what  fills  our  attention,  so  that  we 
forget  to  look  for  the  moving  spirit  behind. 
And  indeed,  in  the  work  of  the  later  classicists, 
there  was  too  often  no  spirit  to  look  for.  The 
husk  alone  remained — a  finicky  pretentious 
framework,  fluttering  with  the  faded  rags  of 
ideals  long  outworn.  Every  great  tradition 
has  its  own  way  of  dying;  and  the  classical 
tradition  died  of  timidity.  It  grew  afraid 
of  the  flesh  and  blood  of  life;  it  was  too  polite 
to  face  realities,  too  elevated  to  tread  the 
common  ground  of  fact  and  detail;  it  would 
touch  nothing  but  generalities,  for  they  alone 
are  safe,  harmless,  and  respectable;  and,  if 
they  are  also  empty,  how  can  that  be  helped? 
Starving,  it  shrank  into  itself,  muttering  old 
incantations;  and  it  continued  to  mutter 
them,  automatically,  some  time  after  it  had 
expired. 

But,  in  the  heyday  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV, 
literature  showed  no  signs  of  such  a  malady — 
though  no  doubt  it  contained  the  latent  germs 


70  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

of  the  disease;  on  the  contrary,  the  master- 
pieces of  that  epoch  are  charged  to  the  full 
with  vitality  and  force.  We  may  describe 
them,  in  one  word,  as  worldly — worldly  in 
the  broadest  and  the  highest  acceptation  of 
the  term.  They  represent,  in  its  perfect 
expression,  the  spirit  of  this  world — its  great- 
ness, its  splendour,  its  intensity,  the  human 
drama  that  animates  it,  the  ordered  beauty 
towards  which  it  tends.  For  that  was  an 
age  in  which  the  world,  in  all  the  plenitude 
of  its  brilliance,  had  come  into  its  own,  when 
the  sombre  spirituality  of  the  Middle  Ages 
had  been  at  last  forgotten,  when  the  litera- 
tures of  Greece  and  Rome  had  delivered  their 
benignant  message,  when  civilisation  could 
enjoy  for  a  space  its  new  maturity,  before  a 
larger  vision  had  brought  questionings,  and 
an  inward  vision  aspirations  unknown  before. 
The  literature  of  those  days  was  founded  upon 
a  general  acceptance — acceptance  both  in  the 
sphere  of  politics  and  of  philosophy.  It  took 
for  granted  a  fixed  and  autocratic  society; 
it  silently  assumed  the  orthodox  teaching  of 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  Thus,  com- 
pared with  the  literature  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  it  was  unspeculative;  compared  with 
that  of  the  Middle  Ages,  unspiritual.  It  was 
devoid  of  that  perception  of  the  marvellous 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  71 

and  awful  significance  of  Natural  phenomena 
which  dominates  the  literature  of  the  Roman- 
tic Revival.  Fate,  Eternity,  Nature,  the  des- 
tiny of  Man,  "the  prophetic  soul  of  the  wide 
world  dreaming  on  things  to  come" — such 
mysteries  it  almost  absolutely  ignored.  Even 
Death  seemed  to  lie  a  little  beyond  its  vision. 
What  a  difference,  in  this  respect,  between 
the  literature  of  Louis  XIV  and  the  literature 
of  Elizabeth!  The  latter  is  obsessed  by  the 
smell  of  mortality;  its  imagination,  penetrat- 
ing to  the  depths  and  the  heights,  shows  us 
mankind  adrift  amid  eternities,  and  the  whole 
universe  the  doubtful  shadow  of  a  dream.  In 
the  former,  these  magnificent  obscurities  find 
no  place:  they  have  been  shut  out,  as  it  were, 
like  a  night  of  storm  and  darkness  on  the  other 
side  of  the  window.  The  night  is  there,  no 
doubt;  but  it  is  outside,  invisible  and  neg- 
lected, while  within,  the  candles  are  lighted, 
the  company  is  gathered  together,  and  all  is 
warmth  and  brilliance.  To  eyes  which  have 
grown  accustomed  to  the  elemental  conflicts 
without,  the  room  may  seem  at  first  confined, 
artificial,  and  insignificant.  But  let  us  wait  a 
little!  Gradually  we  shall  come  to  feel  the 
charm  of  the  well-ordered  chamber,  to  appre- 
ciate the  beauty  of  the  decorations,  the  dis- 
tinction and  the  penetration  of  the  talk.  And, 


72  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

if  we  persevere,  that  is  not  all  we  shall  dis- 
cover. We  shall  find,  in  that  small  society, 
something  more  than  ease  and  good  breeding 
and  refinement;  we  shall  find  the  play  of  pas- 
sion and  the  subtle  manifestation  of  the  soul ; 
we  shall  realise  that  the  shutting  out  of  ter- 
rors and  of  mysteries  has  brought  at  least  the 
gain  of  concentration,  so  that  we  may  discern 
unhindered  the  movements  of  the  mind  of 
man — of  man,  not  rapt  aloft  in  the  vast 
ardours  of  speculation,  nor  involved  in  the 
solitary  introspection  of  his  own  breast;  but 
of  man,  civilised,  actual,  among  his  fellows,  in 
the  bright  light  of  the  world. 

Yet,  if  it  is  true  that  a  refined  and  splendid 
worldliness  was  the  dominant  characteristic 
of  the  literature  of  the  age,  it  is  no  less  true 
that  here  and  there,  in  its  greatest  writers, 
a  contrary  tendency — faint  but  unmistakable 
— may  be  perceived.  The  tone  occasionally 
changes;  below  the  polished  surface  a  dis- 
quietude becomes  discernible;  a  momentary 
obscure  exception  to  the  general  easy-flowing 
rule.  The  supreme  artists  of  the  epoch  seem 
to  have  been  able  not  only  to  give  expression 
to  the  moving  forces  of  their  time,  but  to 
react  against  them.  They  were  rebels  as 
well  as  conquerors,  and  this  fact  lends  an 
extraordinary  interest  to  their  work.  Like 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  73 

some  subtle  unexpected  spice  in  a  masterly 
confection,  a  strange,  profound,  unworldly 
melancholy  just  permeates  their  most  brilliant 
writings,  and  gives  the  last  fine  taste. 

Before  considering  these  supreme  artists 
more  particularly,  it  will  be  well  to  notice 
briefly  the  work  of  one  who  can  lay  no  claim 
to  such  a  title,  but  who  deserves  attention 
as  the  spokesman  of  the  literary  ideals  of  his 
age.  BOILEAU,  once  the  undisputed  arbiter 
of  taste  throughout  Europe,  is  now  hardly 
remembered  save  as  the  high-priest  of  an 
effete  tradition  and  as  the  author  of  some 
brilliant  lines  which  have  passed  as  proverbs 
into  the  French  language.  He  was  a  man 
of  vivid  intelligence — courageous,  independ- 
ent, passionately  devoted  to  literature,  and 
a  highly  skilled  worker  in  the  difficult  art  of 
writing  verse.  But  he  lacked  the  force  and 
the  finesse  of  poetic  genius;  and  it  is  not  as 
a  poet  that  he  is  interesting:  it  is  as  a  critic. 
When  the  lines  upon  which  French  literature 
was  to  develop  were  still  uncertain,  when  the 
Classical  school  was  in  its  infancy,  and  its 
great  leaders — Moliere,  Racine,  La  Fontaine 
—were  still  disputing  their  right  to  pre- 
eminence among  a  host  of  inferior  and  now 
forgotten  writers  whose  works  were  carrying 


74  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

on  the  weak  and  tasteless  traditions  of  the 
former  age — it  was  at  this  moment  that 
Boileau  brought  to  the  aid  of  the  new  move- 
ment the  whole  force  of  his  admirable  clear- 
sightedness, his  dauntless  pertinacity,  and  his 
caustic,  unforgettable  wit.  No  doubt,  with- 
out him,  the  Classical  school  would  have 
triumphed — ultimately,  like  all  good  things — 
but  it  would  be  hard  to  exaggerate  the  service 
which  was  rendered  it  by  Boileau.  During 
many  years,  in  a  long  series  of  satires  and 
epistles,  in  the  Art  Poetique  and  in  various 
prose  works,  he  impressed  upon  the  reading 
public  the  worthlessness  of  the  old  artificial 
school  of  preciosity  and  affectation,  and  the 
high  value  of  the  achievements  of  his  great 
contemporaries.  He  did  more:  he  not  only 
attacked  and  eulogised  the  works  of  individ- 
uals, he  formulated  general  principles  and  gave 
pointed  and  repeated  expression  to  the  ideals 
of  the  new  school.  Thus,  through  him,  clas- 
sicism gained  self -consciousness;  it  became 
possessed  of  a  definite  doctrine;  and  a  group 
of  writers  was  formed,  united  together  by 
common  aims,  and  destined  to  exercise  an 
immense  influence  upon  the  development  not 
only  of  French,  but  of  European  literature. 
For  these  reasons — for  his  almost  unerring 
prescience  in  the  discernment  of  contem- 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  75 

porary  merit  and  for  his  triumphant  consoli- 
dation of  the  classical  tradition — Boileau 
must  be  reckoned  as  the  earliest  of  that  illus- 
trious company  of  great  critics  which  is  one 
of  the  peculiar  glories  of  French  letters.  The 
bulk  of  his  writing  will  probably  never  again 
be  read  by  any  save  the  curious  explorer;  but 
the  spirit  of  his  work  lies  happily  condensed 
in  one  short  epistle — A  son  Esprit — where  his 
good  sense,  his  wit,  his  lucid  vigour,  and  his 
essential  humanity  find  their  consummate 
expression;  it  is  a  spirit  which  still  animates 
the  literature  of  France. 

His  teaching,  however,  so  valuable  in  its 
own  day,  is  not  important  as  a  contribution 
towards  a  general  theory  of  aesthetics.  Boileau 
attempted  to  lay  down  the  principles  univer- 
sally binding  upon  writers  of  poetry;  but  he 
had  not  the  equipment  necessary  for  such  a 
task.  His  knowledge  was  limited,  his  sym- 
pathies were  narrow,  and  his  intellectual 
powers  lacked  profundity.  The  result  was 
that  he  committed  the  common  fault  of 
writers  immersed  in  the  business  of  contem- 
porary controversy — he  erected  the  precepts, 
which  he  saw  to  be  salutary  so  far  as  his  own 
generation  was  concerned,  to  the  dignity  of 
universal  rules.  His  message,  in  reality,  was 
for  the  France  of  Louis  XIV;  he  enunciated 


76  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

it  as  if  it  was  the  one  guide  to  literary  salva- 
tion for  all  ages  and  in  all  circumstances;  and 
it  so  happened  that  for  about  a  century  it  was 
accepted  at  his  own  valuation  by  the  majority 
of  civilised  mankind.  Boileau  detested — and 
rightly  detested — the  extravagant  affectations 
of  the  precieux  school,  the  feeble  pompos- 
ities of  Chapelain,  the  contorted,  inflated, 
logic-chopping  heroes  of  Corneille's  later 
style;  and  the  classical  reaction  against  these 
errors  appeared  to  him  in  the  guise  of  a  return 
to  the  fundamental  principles  of  Nature, 
Reason,  and  Truth.  In  a  sense  he  was  right: 
for  it  is  certain  that  the  works  of  Moliere  and 
Racine  were  more  natural,  more  reasonable, 
and  more  truthful  than  those  of  1'Abbe  Cotin 
and  Pradon;  his  mistake  lay  in  his  assump- 
tion that  these  qualities  were  the  monopoly  of 
the  Classical  school.  Perceiving  the  beauty 
of  clarity,  order,  refinement,  and  simplicity, 
he  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  these  were 
the  characteristics  of  Nature  herself,  and 
that,  without  them,  no  beauty  could  exist. 
He  was  wrong.  Nature  is  too  large  a  thing 
to  fit  into  a  system  of  aesthetics;  and  beauty 
is  often — perhaps  more  often  than  not — 
complex,  obscure,  fantastic,  and  strange.  At 
the  bottom  of  all  Boileau's  theories  lay  a 
hearty  love  of  sound  common  sense.  It  was 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  77 

not,  as  has  sometimes  been  asserted,  imagina- 
tion that  he  disliked,  but  singularity.  He 
could  write,  for  instance,  an  enthusiastic 
appreciation  of  the  sublime  sentence,  "God 
said,  Let  there  be  light,  and  there  was 
light";  for  there  imagination  is  clothed 
in  transparent  beauty,  and  grandeur  is 
achieved  by  the  simplest  means.  More  com- 
pletely than  any  of  his  great  contemporaries, 
Boileau  was  a  representative  of  middle-class 
France. 

Certainly  the  most  famous,  and  perhaps 
the  greatest,  of  the  writers  for  whom  Boileau 
acted  as  the  apologist  and  the  interpreter 
was  MOLIERE.  In  the  literature  of  France 
Moliere  occupies  the  same  kind  of  position 
as  Cervantes  in  that  of  Spain,  Dante  in  that 
of  Italy,  and  Shakespeare  in  that  of  England. 
His  glory  is  more  than  national — it  is  univer- 
sal. Gathering  within  the  plenitude  of  his 
genius  the  widest  and  the  profoundest  char- 
acteristics of  his  race,  he  has  risen  above 
the  boundaries  of  place  and  language  and  tra- 
dition into  a  large  dominion  over  the  hearts 
of  all  mankind.  To  the  world  outside  France 
he  alone,  in  undisputed  eminence,  speaks  with 
the  authentic  voice  of  France  herself. 

That  this  is  so  is  owing  mainly,  of  course,  to 


78  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  power  of  his  genius;  but  it  is  also  owing, 
in  some  degree,  to  the  particular  form  which 
his  genius  took.  Judging  by  quality  alone, 
it  is  difficult  to  say  whether  his  work  stands 
higher  or  lower  in  the  scale  of  human  achieve- 
ment than  that  of  Racine — whether  the 
breadth  of  vision,  the  diversity,  and  the 
humanity  of  his  comedies  do  or  do  not  coun- 
terbalance the  poetry,  the  intensity,  and  the 
perfect  art  of  his  friend's  tragedies;  at  least 
it  seems  certain  that  the  difference  between 
the  reputations  of  the  two  men  with  the 
world  in  general  by  no  means  corresponds 
with  the  real  difference  in  their  worth.  It  is 
by  his  very  perfection,  by  the  very  complete- 
ness of  his  triumph,  that  Racine  loses.  He 
is  so  absolute,  so  special  a  product  of  French 
genius,  that  it  is  well-nigh  impossible  for  any 
one  not  born  a  Frenchman  to  appreciate  him 
to  the  full;  it  is  by  his  incompleteness,  and 
to  some  extent  even  by  his  imperfections, 
that  Moliere  gains.  Of  all  the  great  French 
classics,  he  is  the  least  classical.  His  fluid 
mind  overflowed  the  mould  he  worked  in. 
His  art,  sweeping  over  the  whole  range  of 
comic  emotions,  from  the  wildest  buffoonery 
to  the  grimmest  satire  and  the  subtlest  wit, 
touched  life  too  closely  and  too  often  to  attain 
to  that  flawless  beauty  to  which  it  seems  to 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  79 

aspire.  He  lacked  the  precision  of  form 
which  is  the  mark  of  the  consummate  artist; 
he  was  sometimes  tentative  and  ambiguous, 
often  careless;  the  structure  of  some  of 
his  finest  works  was  perfunctorily  thrown 
together;  the  envelope  of  his  thought — 
his  language — was  by  no  means  faultless,  his 
verse  often  coming  near  to  prose,  and  his 
prose  sometimes  aping  the  rhythm  of  verse. 
In  fact,  it  is  not  surprising  that  to  the  rigid 
classicists  of  the  eighteenth  century  this 
Colossus  had  feet  of  clay.  But,  after  all, 
even  clay  has  a  merit  of  its  own:  it  is  the 
substance  of  the  common  earth.  That  sub- 
stance, entering  into  the  composition  of 
Moliere,  gave  him  his  broad-based  solidity, 
and  brought  him  into  kinship  with  the  wide 
humanity  of  the  world. 

It  was  on  this  side  that  his  work  was  pro- 
foundly influenced  by  the  circumstances  of 
his  life.  Moliere  never  knew  the  leisure,  the 
seclusion,  the  freedom  from  external  cares, 
without  which  it  is  hardly  possible  for  art  to 
mature  to  perfection;  he  passed  his  existence 
in  the  thick  of  the  battle,  and  he  died  as  he 
had  lived — in  the  harness  of  the  professional 
entertainer.  His  early  years  were  spent  amid 
the  rough  and  sordid  surroundings  of  a  travel- 
ling provincial  company,  of  which  he  became 


80  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  manager  and  the  principal  actor,  and 
for  which  he  composed  his  first  plays.  He 
matured  late.  It  was  not  till  he  was  thirty- 
seven  that  he  produced  Les  Precieuses  Ridi- 
cules— his  first  work  of  genius;  and  it  was  not 
till  three  years  later  that  he  came  into  the  full 
possession  of  his  powers  with  L'ficole  des 
Femmes.  All  his  masterpieces  were  written 
in  the  ten  years  that  followed  (1662-1673). 
During  that  period  the  patronage  of  the 
king  gave  him  an  assured  position;  he 
became  a  celebrity  at  Paris  and  Versailles; 
he  was  a  successful  man.  Yet,  even  during 
these  years  of  prosperity,  he  was  far  from 
being  free  from  troubles.  He  was  obliged 
to  struggle  incessantly  against  the  intrigues 
of  his  enemies,  among  whom  the  ecclesiastical 
authorities  were  the  most  ferocious;  and  even 
the  favour  of  Louis  had  its  drawbacks,  for 
it  involved  a  constant  expenditure  of  energy 
upon  the  frivolous  and  temporary  entertain- 
ments of  the  Court.  In  addition,  he  was 
unhappy  in  his  private  life.  Unlike  Shake- 
speare, with  whom  his  career  offers  many 
analogies,  he  never  lived  to  reap  the  quiet 
benefit  of  his  work,  for  he  died  in  the  midst 
of  it,  at  the  age  of  fifty-one,  after  a  perform- 
ance in  the  title-role  of  his  own  Malade 
Imaginaire. 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  81 

What  he  had  achieved  was,  in  the  first 
place,  the  creation  of  French  Comedy.  Before 
him,  there  had  been  boisterous  farces,  conven- 
tional comedies  of  intrigue  borrowed  from  the 
Italian,  and  extravagant  pieces  of  adventure 
and  burlesque  cast  in  the  Spanish  mould. 
Moliere  did  for  the  comic  element  in  French 
literature  what  Corneille  had  done  for  the 
tragic:  he  raised  it  to  the  level  of  serious  art. 
It  was  he  who  first  completely  discovered  the 
aesthetic  possibilities  that  lay  in  the  ordinary 
life  of  every  day.  He  was  the  most  unroman- 
tic  of  writers — a  realist  to  the  core;  and  he 
understood  that  the  true  subject  of  comedy 
was  to  be  found  in  the  actual  facts  of  human 
society — in  the  affectations  of  fools,  the  ab- 
surdities of  cranks,  the  stupidities  of  dupes, 
the  audacities  of  impostors,  the  humours  and 
the  follies  of  family  life.  And,  like  all  great 
originators,  his  influence  has  been  immense. 
At  one  blow,  he  established  Comedy  in  its 
true  position  and  laid  down  the  lines  on 
which  it  was  to  develop  for  the  next  two 
hundred  years.  At  the  present  day,  all 
over  Europe,  the  main  characteristics  of  the 
average  play  may  be  traced  straight  back 
to  their  source  in  the  dominating  genius  of 
Moliere. 

If  he  fell  short  of  the  classical  ideal  in  his 


82  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

workmanship,  if  he  exceeded  it  in  the  breadth 
and  diversity  of  his  mind,  it  is  still  true  that 
the  essence  of  his  dramatic  method  was  hardly 
less  classical  than  that  of  Racine  himself. 
His  subject-matter  was  rich  and  various; 
but  his  treatment  of  it  was  strictly  limited  by 
the  classical  conception  of  art.  He  always 
worked  by  selection.  His  incidents  are  very 
few,  chosen  with  the  utmost  care,  impressed 
upon  the  spectator  with  astonishing  force, 
and  exquisitely  arranged  to  succeed  each 
other  at  the  most  effective  moment.  The 
choice  of  the  incidents  is  determined  invari- 
ably by  one  consideration — the  light  which 
they  throw  upon  the  characters;  and  the 
characters  themselves  appear  to  us  from  only 
a  very  few  carefully  chosen  points  of  view. 
The  narrowed  and  selective  nature  of  Moli- 
ere's  treatment  of  character  presents  an  illu- 
minating contrast  when  compared  with  the 
elaborately  detailed  method  of  such  a  master 
of  the  romantic  style  as  Shakespeare.  The 
English  dramatist  shows  his  persons  to  us 
in  the  round;  innumerable  facets  flash  out 
quality  after  quality;  the  subtlest  and  most 
elusive  shades  of  temperament  are  indicated; 
until  at  last  the  whole  being  takes  shape 
before  us,  endowed  with  what  seems  to  be  the 
very  complexity  and  mystery  of  life  itself. 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  83 

Entirely  different  is  the  great  Frenchman's 
way.  Instead  of  expanding,  he  deliberately 
narrows  his  view;  he  seizes  upon  two  or  three 
salient  qualities  in  a  character  and  then  uses 
all  his  art  to  impress  them  indelibly  upon  our 
minds.  His  Harpagon  is  a  miser,  and  he  is 
old — and  that  is  all  we  know  about  him: 
how  singularly  limited  a  presentment  com- 
pared with  that  of  Shakespeare's  bitter,  proud, 
avaricious,  vindictive,  sensitive,  and  almost 
pathetic  Jew!  Tartufe,  perhaps  the  greatest 
of  all  Moliere's  characters,  presents  a  less 
complex  figure  even  than  such  a  slight  sketch 
as  Shakespeare's  Malvolio.  Who  would  have 
foreseen  Malvolio's  exquisitely  preposterous 
address  to  Jove?  In  Tartufe  there  are  no 
such  surprises.  He  displays  three  qualities, 
and  three  only — religious  hypocrisy,  lascivi- 
ousness,  and  the  love  of  power;  and  there  is 
not  a  word  that  he  utters  which  is  not  impreg- 
nated with  one  or  all  of  these.  Beside  the  vast 
elaboration  of  a  Falstaff,  he  seems,  at  first 
sight,  hardly  more  solid  than  some  astound- 
ing silhouette;  yet — such  was  the  power  and 
intensity  of  Moliere's  art — the  more  we  look, 
the  more  difficult  we  shall  find  it  to  be  certain 
that  Tartufe  is  a  less  tremendous  creation 
even  than  Falstaff  himself. 

For,  indeed,  it  is  in  his  characters  that 


84  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Moliere's  genius  triumphs  most.  His  method 
is  narrow,  but  it  is  deep.  He  rushes  to  the 
essentials  of  a  human  being — tears  out  his 
vitals,  as  it  were — and,  with  a  few  repeated 
master-strokes,  transfixes  the  naked  soul. 
His  flashlight  never  fails:  the  affected  fop, 
the  ignorant  doctor,  the  silly  tradesman,  the 
heartless  woman  of  fashion — on  these,  and 
on  a  hundred  more,  he  turns  it,  inexorably 
smiling,  just  at  the  compromising  moment; 
then  turns  it  off  again,  to  leave  us  with  a 
vision  that  we  can  never  forget.  Nor  is  it 
only  by  its  vividness  that  his  portraiture 
excels.  At  its  best  it  rises  into  the  region  of 
sublimity,  giving  us  new  visions  of  the  gran- 
deur to  which  the  human  spirit  can  attain. 
It  is  sometimes  said  that  the  essence  of 
Moliere  lies  in  his  common  sense;  that  his 
fundamental  doctrine  is  the  value  of  modera- 
tion, of  the  calm  average  outlook  of  the 
sensible  man  of  the  world — I'honnete  homme. 
And  no  doubt  this  teaching  is  to  be  found 
throughout  his  work,  devoted  as  it  is,  by  its 
very  nature,  to  the  eccentricities  and  exagger- 
ations which  beset  humanity.  But  if  he  had 
been  nothing  more  than  a  sober  propounder 
of  the  golden  mean  he  never  would  have  come 
to  greatness.  No  man  realised  more  clearly 
the  importance  of  good  sense;  but  he  saw 


85 

farther  than  that:  he  looked  into  the  pro- 
fundities of  the  soul,  and  measured  those 
strange  forces  which  brush  aside  the  feeble 
dictates  of  human  wisdom  like  gossamer,  and 
lend,  by  their  very  lack  of  compromise,  a 
dignity  and  almost  a  nobility  to  folly  and  even 
vice  itself.  Thus  it  is  that  he  has  invested  the 
feeble,  miserable  Harpagon  with  a  kind  of 
sordid  splendour,  and  that  he  has  elevated  the 
scoundrel  Don  Juan  into  an  alarming  image 
of  intellectual  power  and  pride.  In  his  satire 
on  learned  ladies — Les  Femmes  Savantes — 
the  ridicule  is  incessant,  remorseless;  the 
absurd,  pedantic,  self-complacent  women  are 
turned  inside  out  before  our  eyes  amid  a 
cataract  of  laughter;  and,  if  Moliere  had  been 
merely  the  well-balanced  moralist  some  critics 
suppose,  that,  no  doubt,  would  have  been 
enough.  But  for  the  true  Moliere  it  was  not 
enough.  The  impression  which  he  leaves  upon 
us  at  the  end  of  the  play  is  not  simply  one  of 
the  utter  folly  of  learning  out  of  place;  in 
Philaminte,  the  central  female  figure,  he  has 
depicted  the  elevation  that  belongs  even  to 
a  mistaken  and  perverted  love  of  what  is 
excellent;  and  when  she  finally  goes  out, 
ridiculous,  baffled,  but  as  unyielding  as  ever 
in  her  devotion  to  grammar  and  astronomy, 
we  come  near,  in  the  face  of  her  majestic 


86  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

absurdity,  to  a  feeling  of  respect.  More 
remarkably  still  is  Moliere's  portrayal  of  the 
eminence  of  the  human  spirit  in  the  case  of 
Tartufe.  Here  it  is  vice  in  its  meanest  and 
niost  repulsive  forms  which  has  become  en- 
dowed with  an  awful  grandeur.  Tartufe,  the 
hypocrite,  the  swindler,  the  seducer  of  his 
benefactor's  wife,  looms  out  on  us  with  the 
kind  of  horrible  greatness  that  Milton's 
Satan  might  have  had  if  he  had  come  to  live 
with  a  bourgeois  family  in  seventeenth- 
century  France. 

Moliere's  genius  was  many-sided;  he  was  a 
master  not  only  of  the  smile,  but  of  the  laugh. 
He  is  the  gayest  of  writers,  and  his  farces,  in 
their  wild  hilarity,  their  contagious  absurdity, 
are  perfect  models  of  what  a  farce  should  be. 
He  has  made  these  light,  frivolous^  happy 
things  as  eternal  as  the  severest  and  the 
weightiest  works  of  man.  He  has  filled  them 
with  a  wonderful  irresponsible  wisdom,  con- 
densing into  single  phrases  the  ridiculousness 
of  generations: — "Nous  avons  change  tout 
cela" — "Que  diable  allait-il  faire  dans  cette 
galere?"-  "Vous  etes  orfevre,  Monsieur 
Josse."  So  effectually  has  he  contrived  to 
embalm  in  the  spice  of  his  humour  even  the 
momentary  affectations  of  his  own  time  that 
they  have  come  down  to  us  as  fresh  as  when 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  87 

they  first  appeared,  and  the  Precieuses  Ridi- 
cules— a  skit  upon  the  manners  and  modes 
of  speech  affected  by  the  fops  of  1650 — still 
raises  to-day  our  inextinguishable  laughter. 
This  is  the  obvious  side  of  Moliere;  and  it  is 
hardly  in  need  of  emphasis. 

It  is  the  more  remote  quality  of  his  mind — 
his  brooding  melancholy,  shot  through  with 
bitterness  and  doubt — that  may  at  first  sight 
escape  the  notice  of  the  reader,  and  that  will 
repay  the  deepest  attention.  His  greatest 
works  come  near  to  tragedy.  Le  Tartufe,  in 
spite  of  its  patched-up  happy  ending,  leaves 
an  impression  of  horror  upon  the  mind.  Don 
Juan  seems  to  inculcate  a  lesson  of  fatalistic 
scepticism.  In  this  extraordinary  play — of 
all  Moliere's  works,  the  farthest  removed 
from  the  classical  ideal — the  conventional 
rules  of  religion  and  morality  are  exposed  to 
a  withering  scorn;  Don  Juan,  the  very  em- 
bodiment of  the  arrogance  of  intellect,  and 
his  servant  Sganarelle,  the  futile  and  super- 
stitious supporter  of  decency  and  law,  come 
before  us  as  the  only  alternatives  for  our 
choice;  the  antithesis  is  never  resolved; 
and,  though  in  the  end  the  cynic  is  destroyed 
by  a  coup  de  theatre,  the  fool  in  all  his  fool- 
ishness still  confronts  us  when  the  curtain 
falls. 


88  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Don  Juan — so  enigmatic  in  its  meaning  and 
so  loose  in  its  structure — might  almost  be  the 
work  of  some  writer  of  the  late  nineteenth 
century;  but  Le  Misanthrope — at  once  so 
harmonious  and  so  brilliant,  so  lucid  and  so 
profound — could  only  have  been  produced  in 
the  age  of  Louis  XIV.  Here,  in  all  proba- 
bility, Moliere's  genius  reached  its  height. 
The  play  shows  us  a  small  group  of  ladies  and 
gentlemen,  in  the  midst  of  which  one  man — 
Alceste — stands  out  pre-eminent  for  the  in- 
tensity of  his  feelings  and  the  honesty  of  his 
thoughts.  He  is  in  love  with  Celimene,  a 
brilliant  and  fascinating  woman  of  the  world; 
and  the  subject  of  the  play  is  his  disillusion- 
ment. The  plot  is  of  the  slightest;  the 
incidents  are  very  few.  With  marvellous 
art  Moliere  brings  on  the  inevitable  disaster. 
Celimene  will  not  give  up  the  world  for  the 
sake  of  Alceste;  and  he  will  take  her  on  no 
other  terms.  And  that  is  all.  Yet,  when  the 
play  ends,  how  much  has  been  revealed  to  us ! 
The  figure  of  Alceste  has  been  often  taken  as 
a  piece  of  self -portraiture;  and  indeed  it  is 
difficult  not  to  believe  that  some  at  any  rate 
of  Moliere's  own  characteristics  have  gone  to 
the  making  of  this  subtle  and  sympathetic 
creation.  The  essence  of  Alceste  is  not  his 
misanthropy  (the  title  of  the  play  is  somewhat 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  89 

misleading) ,  it  is  his  sensitiveness.  He  alone, 
of  all  the  characters  in  the  piece,  really  feels 
intensely.  He  alone  loves,  suffers,  and  under- 
stands. His  melancholy  is  the  melancholy 
of  a  profound  disillusionment.  Moliere,  one 
fancies,  might  have  looked  out  upon  the  world 
just  so — from  "ce  petit  coin  sombre,  avec 
mon  noir  chagrin."  The  world!  To  Alceste, 
at  any  rate,  the  world  was  the  great  enemy— 
a  thing  of  vain  ideals,  cold  hearts,  and  futile 
consolations.  He  pitted  himself  against  it, 
and  he  failed.  The  world  swept  on  remorse- 
lessly, and  left  him,  in  his  little  corner,  alone. 
That  was  his  tragedy.  Was  it  Moliere's  also? 
— a  tragedy,  not  of  kings  and  empires,  of  vast 
catastrophes  and  magnificent  imaginations; 
but  something  hardly  less  moving,  and 
hardly  less  sublime — a  tragedy  of  ordinary 
life. 

Englishmen  have  always  loved  Moliere.  It 
is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  they 
have  always  detested  RACINE.  English  crit- 
ics, from  JDryden  to  Matthew  Arnold,  have 
steadily  refused  to  allow  him  a  place  among 
the  great  writers  of  the  world;  and  the 
ordinary  English  reader  of  to-day  probably 
thinks  of  him — if  he  thinks  of  him  at  all — as  a 
dull,  frigid,  conventional  writer,  who  went  out 


90  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

of  fashion  with  full-bottomed  wigs  and  never 
wrote  a  line  of  true  poetry.  Yet  in  France 
Racine  has  been  the  object  of  almost  universal 
admiration;  his  plays  still  hold  the  stage  and 
draw  forth  the  talents  of  the  greatest  actors; 
and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it  is  the  name 
of  Racine  that  would  first  rise  to  the  lips  of 
an  educated  Frenchman  if  he  were  asked 
to  select  the  one  consummate  master  from 
among  all  the  writers  of  his  race.  Now  in  lit- 
erature, no  less  than  in  politics,  you  cannot 
indict  a  whole  nation..  Some  justice,  some 
meaning,  France  must  have  when  she  declares 
with  one  voice  that  Racine  is  npt  only  one  of 
the  greatest  of  dramatists,  but  also  one  of  the 
greatest  of  poets;  and  it  behoves  an  English- 
man, before  he  condemns  or  despises  a  foreign 
writer,  to  practise  some  humility  and  do  his 
best  to  understand  the  point  of  view  from 
which  that  writer  is  regarded  by  his  own 
compatriots.  No  doubt,  in  the  case  of  Racine, 
this  is  a  particularly  difficult  matter.  There 
are  genuine  national  antipathies  to  be  got 
over — real  differences  in  habits  of  thought  and 
of  taste.  But  this  very  difficulty,  when  it  is 
once  surmounted,  will  make  the  gain  the 
greater.  For  it  will  be  a  gain,  not  only  in 
the  appreciation  of  one  additional  artist,  but 
in  the  appreciation  of  a  new  kind  of  artist; 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  91 

it  will  open  up  a  whole  undiscovered  country 
in  the  continent  of  art. 

English  dramatic  literature  is,  of  course, 
dominated  by  Shakespeare;  and  it  is  almost 
inevitable  that  an  English  reader  should 
measure  the  value  of  other  poetic  drama  by 
the  standards  which  Shakespeare  has  already 
implanted  in  his  mind.  But,  after  all,  Shake- 
speare himself  was  but  the  product  and  the 
crown  of  a  particular  dramatic  convention; 
he  did  not  compose  his  plays  according  to  an 
ideal  pattern;  he  was  an  Elizabethan,  working 
so  consistently  according  to  the  methods  of 
his  age  and  country  that,  as  we  know,  he 
passed  "unguessed  at"  among  his  contem- 
poraries. But  what  were  these  methods  and 
this  convention?  To  judge  of  them  properly 
we  must  look,  not  at  Shakespeare's  master- 
pieces, for  they  are  transfused  and  conse- 
crated with  the  light  of  transcendent  genius, 
but  at  the  average  play  of  an  ordinary  Eliza- 
bethan playwright,  or  even  at  one  of  the  lesser 
works  of  Shakespeare  himself.  And,  if  we 
look  here,  it  will  become  apparent  that  the 
dramatic  tradition  of  the  Elizabethan  age 
was  an  extremely  faulty  one.  It  allowed,  it 
is  true,  of  great  richness,  great  variety,  and 
the  sublimest  heights  of  poetry;  but  it  also 
allowed  of  an  almost  incredible  looseness  of 


92  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

structure  and  vagueness  of  purpose,  of  dull- 
ness, of  insipidity,  and  of  bad  taste.  The 
genius  of  the  Elizabethans  was  astonishing, 
but  it  was  genius  struggling  with  difficulties 
which  were  well-nigh  insuperable;  and,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  in  spite  of  their  amazing  poetic 
and  dramatic  powers,  their  work  has  vanished 
from  the  stage,  and  is  to-day  familiar  to  but 
a  few  of  the  lovers  of  English  literature. 
Shakespeare  alone  was  not  subdued  to  what 
he  worked  in.  His  overwhelming  genius  har- 
monised and  ennobled  the  discordant  elements 
of  the  Elizabethan  tradition,  and  invested 
them  not  only  with  immortality,  but  with 
immortality  understanded  of  the  people.  His 
greatest  works  will  continue  to  be  acted  and 
applauded  so  long  as  there  is  a  theatre  in 
England.  But  even  Shakespeare  himself  was 
not  always  successful.  One  has  only  to  look 
at  some  of  his  secondary  plays — at  Troilus 
and  Cressida,  for  instance,  or  Timon  of  Athens 
— to  see  at  once  how  inveterate  and  malignant 
were  the  diseases  to  which  the  dramatic 
methods  of  the  Elizabethans  were  a  prey. 
Wisdom  and  poetry  are  intertwined  with 
flatness  and  folly;  splendid  situations  drift 
purposeless  to  impotent  conclusions;  brilliant 
psychology  alternates  with  the  grossest  in- 
decency and  the  feeblest  puns.  "O  matter 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  93 

and  impertinency  mixed!"  one  is  inclined  to 
exclaim  at  such  a  spectacle.  And  then  one  is 
blinded  once  more  by  the  glamour  of  Lear 
and  Othello;  one  forgets  the  defective  system 
in  the  triumph  of  a  few  exceptions,  and  all 
plays  seem  intolerable  unless  they  were  writ- 
ten on  the  principle  which  produced  Pericles 
and  Titus  Andronicus  and  the  whole  multitude 
of  distorted  and  disordered  works  of  genius 
of  the  Elizabethan  age. 

Racine's  principles  were,  in  fact,  the  direct 
opposite  of  these.  "Comprehension"  might 
be  taken  as  the  watchword  of  the  Eliza- 
bethans; Racine's  was  "concentration."  His 
great  aim  was  to  produce,  not  an  extraordi- 
nary nor  a  complex  work  of  art,  but  a  flawless 
one;  he  wished  to  be  all  matter  and  no  imper- 
tinency. His  conception  of  a  drama  was  of 
something  swift,  simple,  inevitable;  an  action 
taken  at  the  crisis,  with  no  redundancies  how- 
ever interesting,  no  complications  however 
suggestive,  no  irrelevances  however  beautiful 
—but  plain,  intense,  vigorous,  and  splendid 
with  nothing  but  its  own  essential  force.  Nor 
can  there  be  any  doubt  that  Racine's  view  of 
what  a  drama  should  be  has  been  justified  by 
the  subsequent  history  of  the  stage.  The 
Elizabethan  tradition  has  died  out — or  rather 
it  has  left  the  theatre,  and  become  absorbed 


94  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

i 

in  the  modern  novel;  and  it  is  the  drama  of 
crisis — such  as  Racine  conceived  it — which  is 
now  the  accepted  model  of  what  a  stage-play 
should  be.  And,  in  this  connection,  we  may 
notice  an  old  controversy,  which  still  occa- 
sionally raises  its  head  in  the  waste  places 
of  criticism — the  question  of  the  three  unities. 
In  this  controversy  both  sides  have  been 
content  to  repeat  arguments  which  are  in 
reality  irrelevant  and  futile.  It  is  irrelevant 
to  consider  whether  the  unities  were  or 
were  not  prescribed  by  Aristotle;  and  it 
is  futile  to  ask  whether  the  sense  of  proba- 
bility is  or  is  not  more  shocked  by  the  scenic 
representation  of  an  action  of  thirty-six 
hours  than  by  one  of  twenty-four.  The 
value  of  the  unities  does  not  depend  either 
upon  their  traditional  authority  or — to  use 
the  French  expression — upon  their  vraisem- 
blance.  Their  true  importance  lies  simply 
in  their  being  a  powerful  means  towards 
concentration.  Thus  it  is  clear  that  in  an 
absolute  sense  they  are  neither  good  nor 
bad;  their  goodness  or  badness  depends  upon 
the  kind  of  result  which  the  dramatist  is 
aiming  at.  If  he  wishes  to  produce  a  drama 
of  the  Elizabethan  type — a  drama  of  compre- 
hension— which  shall  include  as  much  as  pos- 
sible of  the  varied  manifestations  of  human 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  95 

life,  then  obviously  the  observance  of  the  uni- 
ties must  exercise  a  restricting  and  narrow- 
ing influence  which  would  be  quite  out  of 
place.  On  the  other  hand,  in  a  drama  of  crisis 
they  are  not  only  useful  but  almost  inevitable. 
If  a  crisis  is  to  be  a  real  crisis  it  must  not  drag 
on  indefinitely;  it  must  not  last  for  more  than 
a  few  hours,  or — to  put  a  rough  limit — for 
more  than  a  single  day;  in  fact,  the  unity  of 
time  must  be  preserved.  Again,  if  the  action 
is  to  pass  quickly,  it  must  pass  in  one  place,  for 
there  will  be  no  time  for  the  movement  of  the 
characters  elsewhere;  thus  the  unity  of  place 
becomes  a  necessity.  Finally,  if  the  mind  is  to 
be  concentrated  to  the  full  upon  a  particular 
crisis,  it  must  not  be  distracted  by  side  issues; 
the  event,  and  nothing  but  the  event,  must 
be  displayed;  in  other  words,  the  dramatist 
will  not  succeed  in  his  object  unless  he 
employs  the  unity  of  action. 

Let  us  see  how  Racine  carries  out  these 
principles  by  taking  one  of  his  most  character- 
istic plays — Berenice — and  comparing  it  with 
an  equally  characteristic  work  of  Shake- 
speare's— Antony  and  Cleopatra.  The  com- 
parison is  particularly  interesting  because  the 
two  dramas,  while  diametrically  opposed  in 
treatment,  yet  offer  some  curious  parallels  in 
the  subjects  with  which  they  deal.  Both  are 


96  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

concerned  with  a  pair  of  lovers  placed  in  the 
highest  position  of  splendour  and  power;  in 
both  the  tragedy  comes  about  through  a  fatal 
discordance  between  the  claims  of  love  and 
of  the  world;  in  both  the  action  passes  in 
the  age  of  Roman  greatness,  and  vast  imperial 
issues  are  intertwined  with  individual  desti- 
nies. Of  Shakespeare's  drama  it  is  hardly 
necessary  to  speak.  Nowhere  else,  perhaps, 
has  that  universal  genius  displayed  more 
completely  the  extraordinary  fertility  of  his 
mind.  The  play  is  crammed  full  and  running 
over  with  the  multifarious  activities  of  human 
existence.  "What  is  there  in  the  whole  of 
life,  in  all  the  experience  of  the  world,"  one 
is  inclined  to  ask  after  a  perusal  of  it,  "that 
is  not  to  be  found  somewhere  or  other  among 
these  amazing  pages?"  This  tremendous 
effect  has  been  produced,  in  the  first  place, 
by  means  of  the  immense  variety  of  the 
characters;  persons  of  every  rank  and  every 
occupation — generals  and  waiting-women, 
princesses  and  pirates,  diplomatists  and  peas- 
ants, eunuchs  and  emperors — all  these  we 
have,  and  a  hundred  more;  and,  of  course,  as 
the  grand  consummation  of  all,  we  have  the 
dazzling  complexity  of  Cleopatra.  But  this 
mass  of  character  could  never  have  been 
presented  to  us  without  a  corresponding 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  97 

variety  of  incident;  and,  indeed,  the  tragedy 
is  packed  with  an  endless  succession  of  inci- 
dents— battles,  intrigues,  marriages,  divorces, 
treacheries,  reconciliations,  deaths.  The  com- 
plicated action  stretches  over  a  long  period 
of  time  and  over  a  huge  tract  of  space.  The 
scene  constantly  shifts  from  Alexandria  to 
Rome,  from  Athens  to  Messina,  from  Pom- 
pey's  galley  to  the  plains  of  Actium.  Some 
commentators  have  been  puzzled  by  the 
multitude  of  these  changes,  and  when,  for  a 
scene  of  a  few  moments,  Shakespeare  shows 
us  a  Roman  army  marching  through  Syria, 
they  have  been  able  to  see  in  it  nothing  more 
than  a  wanton  violation  of  the  rule  of  the 
unity  of  place;  they  have  not  understood 
that  it  is  precisely  by  such  touches  as 
these  that  Shakespeare  has  succeeded  in 
bringing  before  our  minds  a  sense  of  universal 
agitation  and  the  enormous  dissolution  of 
empires. 

Turning  to  Berenice,  we  find  a  curious  con- 
trast. The  whole  tragedy  takes  place  in  a 
small  ante-chamber;  the  action  lasts  hardly 
longer  than  its  actual  performance — about 
two  hours  and  a  half;  and  the  characters  are 
three  in  number.  As  for  the  plot,  it  is  con- 
tained in  the  following  six  words  of  Suetonius : 
"Titus  reginam  Berenicem  dimissit  invitus 


98  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

invitam."  It  seems  extraordinary  that  with 
such  materials  Racine  should  have  ventured 
to  set  out  to  write  a  tragedy:  it  is  more 
extraordinary  still  that  he  succeeded.  The 
interest  of  the  play  never  ceases  for  a  moment; 
the  simple  situation  is  exposed,  developed,  and 
closed  with  all  the  refinements  of  art;  nothing 
is  omitted  that  is  essential,  nothing  that  is 
unessential  is  introduced.  Racine  has  stu- 
diously avoided  anything  approaching  violent 
action  or  contrast  or  complexity;  he  has 
relied  entirely  for  his  effect  upon  his  treatment 
of  a  few  intimate  human  feelings  interacting 
among  themselves.  The  strain  and  press  of 
the  outer  world — that  outer  world  which 
plays  so  great  a  part  in  Shakespeare's  master- 
piece— is  almost  banished  from  his  drama — 
almost,  but  not  quite.  With  wonderful  art 
Racine  manages  to  suggest  that,  behind  the 
quiet  personal  crisis  in  the  retired  little 
room,  the  strain  and  the  pressure  of  outside 
things  do  exist.  For  this  is  the  force  that 
separates  the  lovers — the  cruel  claims  of  gov- 
ernment and  the  state.  When,  at  the  critical 
moment,  Titus  is  at  last  obliged  to  make  the 
fatal  choice,  one  word,  as  he  hesitates,  seems 
to  dominate  and  convince  his  soul:  it  is  the 
word  "Rome."  Into  this  single  syllable 
Racine  has  distilled  his  own  poignant  version 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV  99 

of  the  long-resounding  elaborations  of  Antony 
and  Cleopatra. 

It  would,  no  doubt,  be  absurd  to  claim  for 
Racine's  tragedy  a  place  as  high  as  Shake- 
speare's. But  this  fact  should  not  blind  us  to 
the  extraordinary  merits  which  it  does  possess. 
In  one  respect,  indeed,  it  might  be  urged 
that  the  English  play  is  surpassed  by  the 
French  one — and  that  is,  as  a  play.  Berenice 
is  still  acted  with  success;  but  Antony  and 

Cleopatra ?  It  is  impossible  to  do  justice 

to  such  a  work  on  the  stage;  it  must  be 
mutilated,  rearranged,  decocted,  and  in  the 
end,  at  the  best,  it  will  hardly  do  more 
than  produce  an  impression  of  confused 
splendour  on  an  audience.  It  is  the  old 
difficulty  of  getting  a  quart  into  a  pint 
bottle.  But  Berenice  is  a  pint — neither  more 
nor  less,  and  fits  its  bottle  to  a  nicety.  To 
witness  a  performance  of  it  is  a  rare  and 
exquisite  pleasure;  the  impression  is  one  of 
flawless  beauty;  one  comes  away  profoundly 
moved,  and  with  a  new  vision  of  the  capacities 
of  art. 

Singleness  of  purpose  is  the  dominating 
characteristic  of  the  French  classical  drama, 
and  of  Racine's  in  particular;  and  this  single- 
ness shows  itself  not  only  in  the  action  and  its 
accessories,  but  in  the  whole  tone  of  the  piece. 


100  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Unity  of  tone  is,  in  fact,  a  more  important 
element  in  a  play  than  any  other  unity.  To 
obtain  it  Racine  and  his  school  avoided  both 
the  extreme  contrasts  and  the  displays  of 
physical  action  which  the  Elizabethans  de- 
lighted in.  The  mixture  of  comedy  and 
tragedy  was  abhorrent  to  Racine,  not  because 
it  was  bad  in  itself,  but  because  it  must  have 
shattered  the  unity  of  his  tone;  and  for  the 
same  reason  he  preferred  not  to  produce  be- 
fore the  audience  the  most  exciting  and  dis- 
turbing circumstances  of  his  plots,  but  to 
present  them  indirectly,  by  means  of  descrip- 
tion. Now  it  is  clear  that  the  great  danger 
lying  before  a  dramatist  who  employs  these 
methods  is  the  danger  of  dullness.  Unity  of 
tone  is  an  excellent  thing,  but  if  the  tone  is  a 
tedious  one,  it  is  better  to  avoid  it.  Unfortu- 
nately Racine's  successors  in  Classical  Trag- 
edy did  not  realise  this  truth.  They  did  not 
understand  the  difficult  art  of  keeping  interest 
alive  without  variety  of  mood,  and  conse- 
quently their  works  are  now  almost  unread- 
able. The  truth  is  that  they  were  deluded  by 
the  apparent  ease  with  which  Racine  accom- 
plished this  difficult  task.  Having  inherited 
his  manner,  they  were  content;  they  forgot 
that  there  was  something  else  which  they  had 
not  inherited — his  genius. 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV         101 

Closely  connected  with  this  difficulty  there 
was  another  over  which  Racine  triumphed 
no  less  completely,  and  which  proved  equally 
fatal  to  his  successors.  Hitherto  we  have 
been  discussing  the  purely  dramatic  aspect 
of  classical  tragedy;  we  must  not  forget  that 
this  drama  was  also  literary.  The  problem 
that  Racine  had  to  solve  was  complicated  by 
the  fact  that  he  was  working,  not  only  with  a 
restricted  dramatic  system,  but  with  a  re- 
stricted language.  His  vocabulary  was  an 
incredibly  small  one — the  smallest,  beyond  a 
doubt,  that  ever  a  great  poet  had  to  deal  with. 
But  that  was  not  all:  the  machinery  of  his 
verse  was  hampered  by  a  thousand  traditional 
restraints;  artificial  rules  of  every  kind 
hedged  round  his  inspiration;  if  he  were  to 
soar  at  all,  he  must  soar  in  shackles.  Yet, 
even  here,  Racine  succeeded:  he  did  soar — 
though  it  is  difficult  at  first  for  the  English 
reader  to  believe  it.  And  here  precisely 
similar  considerations  apply,  as  in  the  case  of 
Racine's  dramatic  method.  In  both  instances 
the  English  reader  is  looking  for  variety,  sur- 
prise, elaboration;  and  when  he  is  given, 
instead,  simplicity,  clarity,  ease,  he  is  apt 
to  see  nothing  but  insipidity  and  flatness. 
Racine's  poetry  differs  as  much  from  Shake- 
speare's as  some  calm-flowing  river  of  the 


102  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

plain  from  a  turbulent  mountain  torrent.  To 
the  dwellers  in  the  mountain  the  smooth  river 
may  seem  at  first  unimpressive.  But  still 
waters  run  deep;  and  the  proverb  applies 
with  peculiar  truth  to  the  poetry  of  Racine. 
Those  ordinary  words,  that  simple  construc- 
tion— what  can  there  be  there  to  deserve  our 
admiration?  On  the  surface,  very  little  no 
doubt;  but  if  we  plunge  below  the  surface  we 
shall  find  a  great  profundity  and  a  singular 
strength.  Racine  is  in  reality  a  writer  of 
extreme  force — but  it  is  a  force  of  absolute 
directness  that  he  wields.  He  uses  the  com- 
monest words,  and  phrases  which  are  almost 
colloquial;  but  every  word,  every  phrase,  goes 
straight  to  its  mark,  and  the  impression  pro- 
duced is  ineffaceable.  In  English  literature 
there  is  very  little  of  such  writing.  When  an 
English  poet  wishes  to  be  forceful  he  almost 
invariably  flies  to  the  gigantic,  the  unexpected, 
and  the  out-of-the-way;  he  searches  for 
strange  metaphors  and  extraordinary  con- 
structions; he  surprises  us  with  curious  mys- 
teries and  imaginations  we  have  never 
dreamed  of  before.  Now  and  then,  how- 
ever, even  in  English  literature,  instances 
arise  of  the  opposite — the  Racinesque — 
method.  In  these  lines  of  Wordsworth,  for 
example — 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          103 

"The  silence  that  is  in  the  starry  sky, 
The  sleep  that  is  among  the  lonely  hills" — 

there  is  no  violent  appeal,  nothing  surprising, 
nothing  odd — only  a  direct  and  inevitable 
beauty;  and  such  is  the  kind  of  effect  which 
Racine  is  constantly  producing.  If  he  wishes 
to  suggest  the  emptiness,  the  darkness,  and 
the  ominous  hush  of  a  night  by  the  sea- 
shore, he  does  so  not  by  strange  similes 
or  the  accumulation  of  complicated  details, 
but  in  a  few  ordinary,  almost  insignificant 
words — 

"Mais  tout  dort,  et  1'armee,  et  les  vents,  et 
Neptune." 

If  he  wishes  to  bring  before  the  mind  the 
terrors  of  nightmare,  a  single  phrase  can 
conjure  them  up — 

"C'etait  pendant  1'horreur  d'une  profonde 
nuit." 

By  the  same  simple  methods  his  art  can 
describe  the  wonderful  and  perfect  beauty  of 
innocence — 

"Le  jour  n'est  pas  plus  pur  que  le  fonds  de 
mon  coeur;" 


104  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  the  furies  of  insensate  passion — 

"C'est  Venus  toute  entiere  a  sa  proie  at- 
tachee." 

But  the  flavour  of  poetry  vanishes  in 
quotation — and  particularly  Racine's,  which 
depends  to  an  unusual  extent  on  its  dramatic 
surroundings,  and  on  the  atmosphere  that  it 
creates.  He  who  wishes  to  appreciate  it  to 
the  full  must  steep  himself  in  it  deep  and  long. 
He  will  be  rewarded.  In  spite  of  a  formal  and 
unfamiliar  style,  in  spite  of  a  limited  vocabu- 
lary, a  conventional  versification,  an  unvaried 
and  uncoloured  form  of  expression — in  spite 
of  all  these  things — (one  is  almost  inclined, 
under  the  spell  of  Racine's  enchantment,  to 
say  because  of  them) — he  will  find  a  new 
beauty  and  a  new  splendour — a  subtle  and 
abiding  grace. 

But  Racine's  extraordinary  powers  as  a 
writer  become  still  more  obvious  when  we  con- 
sider that  besides  being  a  great  poet  he  is  also 
a  great  psychologist.  The  combination  is  ex- 
tremely rare  in  literature,  and  in  Racine's 
case  it  is  especially  remarkable  owing  to  the 
smallness  of  the  linguistic  resources  at  his 
disposal  and  the  rigid  nature  of  the  conven- 
tions in  which  he  worked.  That  he  should 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          105 

have  succeeded  in  infusing  into  his  tiny  com- 
monplace vocabulary,  arranged  in  rhymed 
couplets  according  to  the  strictest  and  most 
artificial  rules,  not  only  the  beauty  of  true 
poetry,  but  the  varied  subtleties  of  character 
and  passion,  is  one  of  those  miracles  of  art 
which  defy  analysis.  Through  the  flowing 
regularity  of  his  Alexandrines  his  personages 
stand  out  distinct  and  palpable,  in  all  the 
vigour  of  life.  The  presentment,  it  is  true,  is 
not  a  detailed  one;  the  accidents  of  character 
are  not  shown  us — only  its  essentials;  the 
human  spirit  comes  before  us  shorn  of  its 
particulars,  naked  and  intense.  Nor  is  it — as 
might,  perhaps,  have  been  expected — in  the 
portrayal  of  intellectual  characters  that  Ra- 
cine particularly  excels;  it  is  in  the  portrayal 
of  passionate  ones.  His  supreme  mastery  is 
over  the  human  heart — the  subtleties,  the 
profundities,  the  agonies,  the  triumphs,  of 
love.  His  gallery  of  lovers  is  a  long  one,  and 
the  greatest  portraits  in  it  are  of  women. 
There  is  the  jealous,  terrific  Hermione;  the 
delicate,  melancholy  Junie;  the  noble,  ex- 
quisite, and  fascinating  Berenice;  there  is 
Roxane  with  her  voluptuous  ruthlessness,  and 
Monime  with  her  purity  and  her  courage; 
and  there  is  the  dark,  incomparable  splendour 
of  Phedre. 


100  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Perhaps  the  play  in  which  Racine's  wonder- 
ful discrimination  in  the  drawing  of  passionate 
character  may  be  seen  in  its  most  striking 
light  is  Andromaque.  Here  there  are  four 
characters — two  men  and  two  women — all 
under  the  dominion  of  intense  feeling,  and 
each  absolutely  distinct.  Andromaque,  the 
still  youthful  widow  of  Hector,  cares  for  only 
two  things  in  the  world  with  passionate  de- 
votion— her  young  son  Astyanax,  and  the 
memory  of  her  husband.  Both  are  the  captives 
of  Pyrrhus,  the  conqueror  of  Troy,  a  straight- 
forward, chivalrous,  but  somewhat  barba- 
rous prince,  who,  though  he  is  affianced  to 
Hermione,  is  desperately  in  love  with  An- 
dromaque. Hermione  is  a  splendid  tigress 
consumed  by  her  desire  for  Pyrrhus;  and 
Oreste  is  a  melancholy,  almost  morbid  man, 
whose  passion  for  Hermione  is  the  dominating 
principle  of  his  life.  These  are  the  ingredients 
of  the  tragedy,  ready  to  explode  like  gun- 
powder with  the  slightest  spark.  The  spark 
is  lighted  when  Pyrrhus  declares  to  Andro- 
maque that  if  she  will  not  marry  him  he  will 
execute  her  son.  Andromaque  consents,  but 
decides  secretly  to  kill  herself  immediately 
after  the  marriage,  and  thus  ensure  both  the 
safety  of  Astyanax  and  the  honour  of  Hector's 
wife.  Hermione,  in  a  fury  of  jealousy, 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          107 

declares  that  she  will  fly  with  Oreste,  on  one 
condition — that  he  kill  Pyrrhus.  Oreste,  put- 
ting aside  all  considerations  of  honour  and 
friendship,  consents;  he  kills  Pyrrhus,  and 
then  returns  to  his  mistress  to  claim  his 
reward.  There  follows  one  of  the  most  vio- 
lent scenes  that  Racine  ever  wrote — in  which 
Hermione,  in  an  agony  of  remorse  and  horror, 
turns  upon  her  wretched  lover  and  denounces 
his  crime.  Forgetful  of  her  own  instigation, 
she  demands  who  it  was  that  suggested  to  him 
the  horrible  deed — "Qui  te  Va  dit?"  she 
shrieks:  one  of  those  astounding  phrases 
which,  once  heard,  can  never  be  forgotten. 
She  rushes  out  to  commit  suicide,  and  the 
play  ends  with  Oreste  mad  upon  the  stage. 

The  appearance  of  this  exciting  and  vital 
drama,  written  when  Racine  was  twenty-eight 
years  old,  brought  him  immediate  fame. 
During  the  next  ten  years  (1667-77)  he  pro- 
duced a  series  of  masterpieces,  of  which  per- 
haps the  most  interesting  are  Britannicus, 
where  the  youthful  Nero,  just  plunging  into 
crime,  is  delineated  with  supreme  mastery; 
Bajazet,  whose  subject  is  a  contemporary 
tragedy  of  the  seraglio  at  Constantinople; 
and  a  witty  comedy,  Les  Plaideurs,  based  on 
Aristophanes.  Racine's  character  was  a  com- 
plex one;  he  was  at  once  a  brilliant  and 


108  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

caustic  man  of  the  world,  a  profound  scholar, 
a  sensitive  and  emotional  poet.  He  was 
extremely  combative,  quarrelling  both  with 
the  veteran  Corneille  and  with  the  friend  who 
had  first  helped  him  towards  success — 
Moliere;  and  he  gave  vent  to  his  antipathies 
in  some  very  vigorous  and  cutting  prose 
prefaces  as  well  as  in  some  verse  epigrams 
which  are  among  the  most  venomous  in  the 
language.  Besides  this,  he  was  an  assiduous 
courtier,  and  he  also  found  the  time,  among 
these  various  avocations,  for  carrying  on  at 
least  two  passionate  love-affairs.  At  the  age 
of  thirty-eight,  after  two  years'  labour,  he 
completed  the  work  in  which  his  genius  shows 
itself  in  its  consummate  form — the  great 
tragedy  of  Phedre.  The  play  contains  one 
of  the  most  finished  and  beautiful,  and  at  the 
same  time  one  of  the  most  overwhelming 
studies  of  passion  in  the  literature  of  the 
world.  The  tremendous  role  of  Phedre — • 
which,  as  the  final  touchstone  of  great  acting, 
holds  the  same  place  on  the  French  stage  as 
that  of  Hamlet  on  the  English — dominates 
the  piece,  rising  in  intensity  as  act  follows  act, 
and  "horror  on  horror's  head  accumulates." 
Here,  too,  Racine  has  poured  out  all  the 
wealth  of  his  poetic  powers.  He  has  per- 
formed the  last  miracle,  and  infused  into  the 


109 

ordered  ease  of  the  Alexandrine  a  strange 
sense  of  brooding  mystery  and  indefinable 
terror  and  the  awful  approaches  of  fate.  The 
splendour  of  the  verse  reaches  its  height  in 
the  fourth  act,  when  the  ruined  queen,  at  the 
culmination  of  her  passion,  her  remorse,  and 
her  despair,  sees  in  a  vision  Hell  opening 
to  receive  her,  and  the  appalling  shade  of 
her  father  Minos  dispensing  his  unutterable 
doom.  The  creator  of  this  magnificent  pas- 
sage, in  which  the  imaginative  grandeur  of 
the  loftiest  poetry  and  the  supreme  force  of 
dramatic  emotion  are  mingled  in  a  perfect 
whole,  has  a  right  to  walk  beside  Sophocles  in 
the  high  places  of  eternity. 

Owing  to  the  intrigues  of  a  lady  of  fashion, 
Phedre,  when  it  first  appeared,  was  a  complete 
failure.  An  extraordinary  change  then  took 
place  in  Racine's  mind.  A  revulsion  of  feel- 
ing, the  precise  causes  of  which  are  to  this  day 
a  mystery,  led  him  suddenly  to  renounce  the 
world,  to  retire  into  the  solitude  of  religious 
meditation,  and  to  abandon  the  art  which 
he  had  practised  with  such  success.  He  was 
not  yet  forty,  his  genius  was  apparently  still 
developing,  but  his  great  career  was  at 
an  end.  Towards  the  close  of  his  life  he 
produced  two  more  plays — Esther,  a  short 
idyllic  piece  of  great  beauty,  and  Athalie,  a 


110  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

tragedy  which,  so  far  from  showing  that  his 
powers  had  declined  during  his  long  retreat, 
has  been  pronounced  by  some  critics  to  be 
the  finest  of  his  works.  He  wrote  no  more 
for  the  stage,  and  he  died  eight  years  later, 
at  the  age  of  sixty.  It  is  difficult  to  im- 
agine the  loss  sustained  by  literature  during 
those  twenty  years  of  silence.  They  might 
have  given  us  a  dozen  tragedies,  approach- 
ing, or  even  surpassing,  the  merit  of  Phedre. 
And  Racine  must  have  known  this.  One  is 
tempted  to  see  in  his  mysterious  mortification 
an  instance  of  that  strain  of  disillusionment 
which  runs  like  a  dark  thread  through  the 
brilliant  texture  of  the  literature  of  the  grand 
siecle.  Racine  had  known  to  the  full  the  uses 
of  this  world,  and  he  had  found  them  flat, 
stale,  and  unprofitable;  he  had  found  that 
even  the  triumphs  of  his  art  were  all  compact 
of  worldliness;  and  he  had  turned  away,  in 
an  agony  of  renunciation,  to  lose  himself  in 
the  vision  of  the  Saints. 

The  influence  and  the  character  of  that 
remarkable  age  appear  nowhere  more  clearly 
than  in  the  case  of  its  other  great  poet — LA 
FONTAINE.  In  the  Middle  Ages  La  Fontaine 
would  have  been  a  mendicant  friar,  or  a 
sainted  hermit,  or  a  monk,  surreptitiously 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV         111 

illuminating  the  margins  of  his  manuscripts 
with  the  images  of  birds  and  beasts.  In  the 
nineteenth  century,  one  can  imagine  him 
drifting  among  Paris  cafes,  pouring  out  his 
soul  in  a  random  lyric  or  two,  and  dying  before 
his  time.  The  age  of  Louis  XIV  took  this 
dreamer,  this  idler,  this  feckless,  fugitive, 
spiritual  creature,  kept  him  alive  by  means  of 
patrons  in  high  society,  and  eventually  turned 
him — not  simply  into  a  poet,  for  he  was 
a  poet  by  nature,  but  into  one  of  the 
most  subtle,  deliberate,  patient,  and  exquisite 
craftsmen  who  have  ever  written  in  verse. 
The  process  was  a  long  one;  La  Fontaine  was 
in  his  fifties  when  he  wrote  the  greater  number 
of  his  Fables — where  his  genius  found  its  true 
expression  for  the  first  time.  But  the  process 
was  also  complete.  Among  all  the  wonderful 
and  beautiful  examples  of  masterly  crafts- 
manship in  the  poetry  of  France,  the  Fables  of 
La  Fontaine  stand  out  as  the  models  of  what 
perfect  art  should  be. 

The  main  conception  of  the  Fables  was 
based  upon  the  combination  of  two  ideas — 
that  of  the  stiff  dry  moral  apologue  of  ^Esop, 
and  that  of  the  short  story.  By  far  the  most 
important  of  these  two  elements  was  the 
latter.  With  the  old  fabulists  the  moral  was 
the  excuse  for  the  fable;  with  La  Fontaine 


112  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

it  was  the  othe'r  way  round.  His  moral,  added 
in  a  conventional  tag,  or  even,  sometimes, 
omitted  altogether,  was  simply  of  use  as  the 
point  of  departure  for  the  telling  of  a  charm- 
ing little  tale.  Besides  this,  the  traditional 
employment  of  animals  as  the  personages  in 
a  fable  served  La  Fontaine's  turn  in  another 
way.  It  gave  him  the  opportunity  of  creating 
a  new  and  delightful  atmosphere,  in  which  his 
wit,  his  fancy,  his  humour,  and  his  observa- 
tion could  play  at  their  ease.  His  animals — 
whatever  injudicious  enthusiasts  may  have 
said — are  not  real  animals;  we  are  no  wiser 
as  to  the  true  nature  of  cats  and  mice,  foxes 
and  lions,  after  we  have  read  the  Fables  than 
before.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  are  they  the 
mere  pegs  for  human  attributes  which  they 
were  in  the  hands  of  JSsop.  La  Fontaine's 
creatures  partake  both  of  the  nature  of  real 
animals  and  of  human  beings,  and  it  is  pre- 
cisely in  this  dual  character  of  theirs  that  their 
fascination  lies.  In  their  outward  appear- 
ance they  are  deliciously  true  to  life.  With 
the  fewest  of  rapid  strokes,  La  Fontaine  can 
raise  up  an  unmistakable  vision  of  any  beast 
or  bird,  fish  or  reptile,  that  he  has  a  mind  to — 

"Un  jour  sur  ses  long  pieds  allait  je  ne  sais  ou 
Le    Heron    au    long   bee  .emmanche   d'un 
long  cou." 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          113 

Could  there  be  a  better  description?  And 
his  fables  are  crowded  with  these  life-like 
little  vignettes.  But  the  moment  one  goes 
below  the  surface  one  finds  the  frailties,  the 
follies,  the  virtues,  and  the  vices  of  humanity. 
And  yet  it  is  not  quite  that.  The  creatures  of 
La  Fontaine's  fantasy  are  not  simply  animals 
with  the  minds  of  human  beings:  they  are 
something  more  complicated  and  amusing; 
they  are  animals  with  the  minds  which  human 
beings  would  certainly  have,  if  one  could 
suppose  them  transformed  into  animals. 
When  the  young  and  foolish  rat  sees  a  cat 
for  the  first  time  and  observes  to  his  mother — 

"  Je  le  crois  fort  sympathisant 
Avec  messieurs  les  rats:   car  il  a  des  oreilles 
En  figure  aux  notres  pareilles;" 

this  excellent  reason  is  obviously  not  a  rat's 
reason;  nor  is  it  a  human  being's  reason;  the 
fun  lies  in  its  being  just  the  reason  which,  no 
doubt,  a  silly  young  creature  of  the  human 
species  would  give  in  the  circumstances  if, 
somehow  or  other,  he  were  metamorphosed 
into  a  rat. 

It  is  this  world  of  shifting  lights,  of  queer, 
elusive,  delightful  absurdities,  that  La  Fon- 
taine has  made  the  scene  of  the  greater  num- 


114  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

her  of  his  stories.  The  stories  themselves  are 
for  the  most  part  exceedingly  slight;  what 
gives  them  immortality  is  the  way  they  are 
told.  Under  the  guise  of  an  ingenuous,  old- 
world  manner,  La  Fontaine  makes  use  of  an 
immense  range  of  technical  powers.  He  was 
an  absolute  master  of  the  resources  of  metre; 
and  his  rhythms,  far  looser  and  more  varied 
than  those  of  his  contemporaries,  are  marvel- 
lously expressive,  while  yet  they  never  depart 
from  a  secret  and  controlling  sense  of  form. 
His  vocabulary  is  very  rich — stocked  chiefly 
with  old-fashioned  words,  racy,  colloquial, 
smacking  of  the  soil,  and  put  together  with 
the  light  elliptical  constructions  of  the  com- 
mon people.  Nicknames  he  is  particularly 
fond  of:  the  cat  is  Raminagrobis,  or  Grippe- 
minaud,  or  Rodilard,  or  Maitre  Mitis;  the 
mice  are  "la  gent  trotte-menu  " ;  the  stomach 
is  Messer  Gaster;  Jupiter  is  Jupin;  La  Fon- 
taine himself  is  Gros-Jean.  The  charming 
tales,  one  feels,  might  almost  have  been  told 
by  some  old  country  crony  by  the  fire,  while 
the  wind  was  whistling  in  the  chimney  and 
the  winter  night  drew  on.  The  smile,  the 
gesture,  the  singular  naivete — one  can  watch 
it  all.  But  only  for  a  moment.  One  must  be 
childish  indeed  (and,  by  an  odd  irony,  this 
exquisitely  sophisticated  author  falls  into 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV         115 

the  hands  of  most  of  his  readers  when  they 
are  children)  to  believe,  for  more  than  a 
moment,  that  the  ingenuousness  of  the  Fables 
was  anything  but  assumed.  In  fact,  to  do  so 
would  be  to  miss  the  real  taste  of  the  work. 
There  is  a  kind  of  art,  as  every  one  knows, 
that  conceals  itself;  but  there  is  another — 
and  this  is  less  often  recognised — that  dis- 
plays itself,  that  just  shows,  charmingly  but 
unmistakably,  how  beautifully  contrived  it 
is.  And  La  Fontaine's  art  is  of  the  latter 
sort.  He  is  like  one  of  those  accomplished 
cooks  in  whose  dishes,  though  the  actual 
secret  of  their  making  remains  a  mystery,  one 
can  trace  the  ingredients  which  have  gone  to 
the  concoction  of  the  delicious  whole.  As  one 
swallows  the  rare  morsel,  one  can  just  per- 
ceive how,  behind  the  scenes,  the  oil,  the 
vinegar,  the  olive,  the  sprinkling  of  salt,  the 
drop  of  lemon  were  successively  added,  and, 
at  the  critical  moment,  the  simmering  deli- 
cacy served  up,  done  to  a  turn. 

It  is  indeed  by  an  infinity  of  small  touches 
that  La  Fontaine  produces  his  effects.  And 
his  effects  are  very  various.  With  equal  ease, 
apparently,  he  can  be  playful,  tender,  serious, 
preposterous,  eloquent,  meditative,  and  ab- 
surd. But  one  quality  is  always  present  in 
his  work;  whatever  tune  he  may  be  playing, 


116  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

there  is  never  a  note  too  much.  Alike  in  his 
shortest  six-lined  anecdote  and  his  most  elab- 
orate pieces,  in  which  detail  follows  detail 
and  complex  scenes  are  developed,  there  is 
no  trace  of  the  superfluous;  every  word  has 
its  purpose  in  the  general  scheme.  This 
quality  appears  most  clearly,  perhaps,  in 
the  adroit  swiftness  of  his  conclusions.  When 
once  the  careful  preliminary  foundation  of 
the  story  has  been  laid,  the  crisis  comes 
quick  and  pointed — often  in  a  single  line. 
Thus  we  are  given  a  minute  description 
of  the  friendship  of  the  cat  and  the  spar- 
row; all  sorts  of  details  are  insisted  on;  we 
are  told  how,  when  the  sparrow  teased  the 
cat — 

"En  sage  et  discrete  personne, 
Maitre  chat  excusait  ces  jeux." 

Then  the  second  sparrow  is  introduced  and 
his  quarrel  with  the  first.  The  cat  fires 
up — 

"Le  moineau  du  voisin  viendra  manger  le 

notre? 

Non,  de  par  tous  les  chats! — Entrant  lors 
au  combat, 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV         117 

II  croque  1'etranger.  Vraiment,  dit  maitre 
chat, 

Les  moineaux  ont  un  gout  exquis  et  deli- 
cat!" 

And  now  in  one  line  the  story  ends — 
"Cette  reflexion  fit  aussi  croquer  1'autre." 

One  more  instance  of  La  Fontaine's  inimi- 
table conciseness  may  be  given.  When  Ber- 
trand  (the  monkey)  has  eaten  the  chestnuts 
which  Raton  (the  cat)  has  pulled  out  of  the 
fire,  the  friends  are  interrupted;  the  fable 
ends  thus — 

"Une  servante  vint;  adieu,  mes  gens!   Raton 
N'etait  pas  content,  ce  dit-on." 

How  admirable  are  the  brevity  and  the 
lightness  of  that  "adieu,  mes  gens"!  In 
three  words  the  instantaneous  vanishing 
of  the  animals  is  indicated  with  masterly 
precision.  One  can  almost  see  their  tails 
whisking  round  the  corner. 

Modern  admirers  of  La  Fontaine  have 
tended  to  throw  a  veil  of  sentiment  over  his 
figure,  picturing  him  as  the  consoling  beatific 
child  of  nature,  driven  by  an  unsympathetic 
generation  to  a  wistful  companionship  with 


118  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  dumb  world  of  brutes.  But  nothing  could 
be  farther  from  the  truth  than  this  conception. 
La  Fontaine  was  as  unsentimental  as  Moliere 
himself.  This  does  not  imply  that  he  was 
unfeeling:  feelings  he  had — delicate  and 
poignant  ones;  but  they  never  dominated 
him  to  the  exclusion  of  good  sense.  His 
philosophy — if  we  may  call  so  airy  a  thing  by 
such  a  name — was  the  philosophy  of  some 
gentle  whimsical  follower  of  Epicurus.  He 
loved  nature,  but  unromantically,  as  he  loved 
a  glass  of  wine  and  an  ode  of  Horace,  and  the 
rest  of  the  good  things  of  life.  As  for  the  bad 
things — they  were  there;  he  saw  them — saw 
the  cruelty  of  the  wolf,  and  the  tyranny 
of  the  lion,  and  the  rapacity  of  man — saw 
that — 

"Jupin  pour  chaque  etat  mit  deux  tables  au 

monde; 

L'adroit,  le  vigilant,  et  le  fort  sont  assis 
A  la  premiere;   et  les  petits 
Mangent  leur  reste  a  la  seconde." 

Yet,  while  he  saw  them,  he  could  smile.  It 
was  better  to  smile — if  only  with  regret; 
better,  above  all,  to  pass  lightly,  swiftly,  gaily 
over  the  depths  as  well  as  the  surface  of 
existence;  for  life  is  short — almost  as  short 
as  one  of  his  own  fables. — 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          119 

"Qui  de  nous  des  clartes  de  la  voute  azuree 
Doit  jouir  le  dernier?    Est-il  aucun  moment 
Qui  vous  puisse  assurer  d'un  second  seule- 
ment?" 

The  age  was  great  in  prose  as  well  as  in 
poetry.  The  periods  of  BOSSUET,  ordered, 
lucid,  magnificent,  reflect  its  literary  ideals 
as  clearly  as  the  couplets  of  Racine.  Un- 
fortunately, however,  in  the  case  of  Bossuet, 
the  splendour  and  perfection  of  the  form  is 
very  nearly  all  that  a  modern  reader  can 
appreciate :  the  substance  is  for  the  most  part 
uninteresting  and  out  of  date.  The  truth  is 
that  Bossuet  was  too  completely  a  man  of  his 
own  epoch  to  speak  with  any  great  signifi- 
cance to  after  generations.  His  melodious 
voice  enters  our  ears,  but  not  our  hearts.  The 
honest,  high-minded,  laborious  bishop,  with 
his  dignity  and  his  enthusiasm,  his  eloquence 
and  his  knowledge  of  the  world,  represents 
for  us  the  best  and  most  serious  elements  in 
the  court  of  Louis.  The  average  good  man 
of  those  days  must  have  thought  on  most 
subjects  as  Bossuet  thought — though  less 
finely  and  intensely;  and  Bossuet  never  spoke 
a  sentence  from  his  pulpit  which  went  beyond 
the  mental  vision  of  the  most  ordinary  of  his 
congregation.  He  saw  all  round  his  age,  but 


120  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

he  did  not  see  beyond  it.  Thus,  in  spite  of  his 
intelligence,  his  view  of  the  world  was  lim- 
ited. The  order  of  things  under  Louis  XIV 
was  the  one  order:  outside  that,  all  was 
confusion,  heresy,  and  the  work  of  Satan.  If 
he  had  written  more  often  on  the  great 
unchanging  fundamentals  of  life,  more  of 
his  work  would  have  been  enduring.  But  it 
happened  that,  while  by  birth  he  was  an 
artist,  by  profession  he  was  a  theologian; 
and  even  the  style  of  Bossuet  can  hardly  save 
from  oblivion  the  theological  controversies  of 
two  hundred  years  ago.  The  same  failing 
mars  his  treatment  of  history.  His  Histoire 
Universelle  was  conceived  on  broad  and 
sweeping  lines,  and  contains  some  perspi- 
cacious thinking;  but  the  dominating  notion 
of  the  book  is  a  theological  one — the  illustra- 
tion, by  means  of  the  events  of  history,  of  the 
divine  governance  of  the  world;  and  the  fact 
that  this  conception  of  history  has  now  be- 
come extinct  has  reduced  the  work  to  the 
level  of  a  finely  written  curiosity. 

Purely  as  a  master  of  prose  Bossuet  stands 
in  the  first  rank.  His  style  is  broad,  massive, 
and  luminous;  and  the  great  bulk  of  his 
writing  is  remarkable  more  for  its  measured 
strength  than  for  its  ornament.  Yet  at  times 
the  warm  spirit  of  the  artist,  glowing  through 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV         121 

the  well-ordered  phrases,  diffuses  an  extra- 
ordinary splendour.  When,  in  his  MSdita- 
tions  sur  I'Evangile  or  his  Elevations  sur  les 
Mysteres,  Bossuet  unrolls  the  narratives  of 
the  Bible  or  meditates  upon  the  mysteries  of 
his  religion,  his  language  takes  on  the  colours 
of  poetry  and  soars  on  the  steady  wings  of  an 
exalted  imagination.  In  his  famous  Oraisons 
Funebres  the  magnificent  amplitude  of  his  art 
finds  its  full  expression.  Death,  and  Life, 
and  the  majesty  of  God,  and  the  transitori- 
ness  of  human  glory — upon  such  themes  he 
speaks  with  an  organ-voice  which  reminds  an 
English  reader  of  the  greatest  of  his  English 
contemporaries,  Milton.  The  pompous,  roll- 
ing, resounding  sentences  follow  one  another 
in  a  long  solemnity,  borne  forward  by  a  vast 
movement  of  eloquence  which  underlies,  con- 
trols, and  animates  them  all. 

"  O  nuit  desastreuse !  O  nuit  effroyable, 
ou  retentit  tout-a-coup  comme  un  eclat  de 
tonnerre,  cette  etonnante  nouvelle:  Ma- 
dame se  meurt,  Madame  est  morte!".  .  . 


—The  splendid  words  flow  out  like  a  stream  of 
lava,  molten  and  glowing,  and  then  fix  them- 
selves for  ever  in  adamantine  beauty. 


122  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

We  have  already  seen  that  one  of  the  chief 
characteristics  of  French  classicism  was  com- 
pactness. The  tragedies  of  Racine  are  as 
closely  knit  as  some  lithe  naked  runner  with- 
out an  ounce  of  redundant  flesh;  the  fables 
of  La  Fontaine  are  airy  miracles  of  compres- 
sion. In  prose  the  same  tendency  is  mani- 
fest, but  to  an  even  more  marked  degree.  La 
Rochefoucauld  and  La  Bruyere,  writing  the 
one  at  the  beginning,  the  other  towards  the 
close,  of  the  classical  period,  both  practised 
the  art  of  extreme  brevity  with  astonishing 
success.  The  Due  DE  LA  ROCHEFOUCAULD 
was  the  first  French  writer  to  understand 
completely  the  wonderful  capacities  for 
epigrammatic  statement  which  his  language 
possessed;  and  in  the  dexterous  precision 
of  pointed  phrase  no  succeeding  author 
has  ever  surpassed  him.  His  little  book  of 
Maxims  consists  of  about  five  hundred  de- 
tached sentences,  polished  like  jewels,  and, 
like  jewels,  sparkling  with  an  inner  brilliance 
on  which  it  seems  impossible  that  one  can 
gaze  too  long.  The  book  was  the  work  of 
years,  and  it  contains  in  its  small  compass  the 
observations  of  a  lifetime.  Though  the  re- 
flections are  not  formally  connected,  a  com- 
mon spirit  runs  through  them  all.  "  Vanity  of 
vanities!  All  is  vanity!"  such  is  the  perpet- 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          123 

ual  burden  of  La  Rochefoucauld's  doctrine: 
but  it  is  vanity,  not  in  the  generalised  sense 
of  the  Preacher,  but  in  the  ordinary  personal 
sense  of  empty  egotism  and  petty  self-love 
which,  in  the  eyes  of  this  bitter  moralist,  is  the 
ultimate  essence  of  the  human  spirit  and  the 
secret  spring  of  the  world.  The  case  is  over- 
stated, no  doubt;  but  the  strength  of  La 
Rochefoucauld's  position  can  only  be  appre- 
ciated when  one  has  felt  for  oneself  the  keen 
arrows  of  his  wit.  As  one  turns  over  his 
pages,  the  sentences  strike  into  one  with  a 
deadly  force  of  personal  application;  some- 
times one  almost  blushes;  one  realises  that 
these  things  are  cruel,  that  they  are  humili- 
ating, and  that  they  are  true.  "Nous  avons 
tous  assez  de  force  pour  supporter  les  maux 
d'autrui."-  -"Quelque  bien  qu'on  nous  disc 
de  nous,  on  ne  nous  apprend  rien  de  nouveau." 

-"On  croit  quelquefois  hai'r  la  flatterie, 
mais  on  ne  hait  que  la  maniere  de  flatter." 

"Le  refus  de  la  louange  est  un  desir 
d'etre  loue  deux  fois."-  -"Les  passions  les 
plus  violentes  nous  laissent  quelquefois  du 
relache,  mais  la  vanite  nous  agite  tou- 
jours."  No  more  powerful  dissolvent  for 
the  self-complacency  of  humanity  was  ever 
composed. 

Unlike  the  majority  of  the  writers  of  his 


124  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

age,  La  Rochefoucauld  was  an  aristocrat;  and 
this  fact  gives  a  peculiar  tone  to  his  work.  In 
spite  of  the  great  labour  which  he  spent  upon 
perfecting  it,  he  has  managed,  in  some  subtle 
way,  to  preserve  all  through  it  an  air  of  slight 
disdain.  "Yes,  these  sentences  are  all  per- 
fect," he  seems  to  be  saying;  "but  then, 
what  else  would  you  have?  Unless  one 
writes  perfect  sentences,  why  should  one 
trouble  to  write?"  In  his  opinion,  "le  vrai 
honnete  homme  est  celui  qui  ne  se  pique  de 
rien;"  and  it  is  clear  that  he  followed  his 
own  dictum.  His  attitude  was  eminently 
detached.  Though  what  he  says  reveals  so 
intensely  personal  a  vision,  he  himself  some- 
how remains  impersonal.  Beneath  the  flaw- 
less surface  of  his  workmanship,  the  clever 
Duke  eludes  us.  We  can  only  see,  as  we  peer 
into  the  recesses,  an  infinite  ingenuity  and  a 
very  bitter  love  of  truth. 

A  richer  art  and  a  broader  outlook  upon 
life  meet  us  in  the  pages  of  LA  BRUYERE.  The 
instrument  is  still  the  same — the  witty  and 
searching  epigram — but  it  is  no  longer  being 
played  upon  a  single  string.  La  Bruyere's 
style  is  extremely  supple;  he  throws  his 
apothegms  into  an  infinite  variety  of  moulds, 
employing  a  wide  and  coloured  vocabulary, 
and  a  complete  mastery  of  the  art  of  rhetori- 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV         125 

cal  effect.  Among  these  short  reflections  he 
has  scattered  a  great  number  of  somewhat 
lengthier  portraits  or  character-studies,  some 
altogether  imaginary,  others  founded  wholly 
or  in  part  on  well-known  persons  of  the  day. 
It  is  here  that  the  great  qualities  of  his  style 
show  themselves  most  clearly.  Psychologi- 
cally, these  studies  are  perhaps  less  valuable 
than  has  sometimes  been  supposed:  they  are 
caricatures  rather  than  portraits — records  of 
the  idiosyncrasies  of  humanity  rather  than 
of  humanity  itself.  What  cannot  be  doubted 
for  a  moment  is  the  supreme  art  with  which 
they  have  been  composed.  The  virtuosity  of 
the  language — so  solid  and  yet  so  brilliant, 
so  varied  and  yet  so  pure — reminds  one  of  the 
hard  subtlety  of  a  Greek  gem.  The  rhythm  is 
absolutely  perfect,  and,  with  its  suspensions, 
its  elaborations,  its  gradual  crescendos,  its 
unerring  conclusions,  seems  to  carry  the 
sheer  beauty  of  expressiveness  to  the  farthest 
conceivable  point.  Take,  as  one  instance  out 
of  a  multitude,  this  description  of  the  crank 
who  devotes  his  existence  to  the  production 
of  tulips — 

"Vous  le  voyez  plante  et  qui  a  pris 
racine  au  milieu  de  ses  tulipes  et  devant 
la  Solitaire;  il  ouvre  de  grands  yeux,  il 


126  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

frotte  ses  mains,  il  se  baisse,  il  la  voit 
de  plus  pres,  il  ne  1'a  jamais  vue  si  belle, 
il  a  le  cceur  epanoui  de  joie;  il  la  quitte 
pour  V 'Orientate;  de  la,  il  va  a  la  Veuve; 
il  passe  au  Drap  d'Or,  de  celle-ci  a  I'Agathe, 
d'ou  il  revient  a  la  Solitaire,  ou  il  se 
fixe,  ou  il  se  lasse,  ou  il  s'assied,  ou  il 
oublie  de  diner;  aussi  est-elle  nuancee, 
bordee,  huilee,  a  pieces  emportees;  elle  a 
un  beau  vase  ou  un  beau  calice;  il  la 
contemple,  il  I'admire;  Dieu  et  la  nature 
sont  en  tout  cela  ce  qu'il  n'admire  point; 
il  ne  va  pas  plus  loin  que  1'oignon  de  sa 
tulipe,  qu'il  ne  livrerait  pas  pour  mille 
ecus,  et  qu'il  donnera  pour  rien  quand  les 
tulipes  seront  neligees  et  que  les  ceillets 
auront  prevalu.  Get  homme  raisonnable, 
qui  a  une  ame,  qui  a  un  culte  et  une 
religion,  revient  chez  soi  fatigue,  affame, 
mais  fort  content  de  sa  journee:  il  a  vu 
des  tulipes." 

"Les  Caracteres"  is  the  title  of  La  Bruy- 
ere's  book;  but  its  sub-title — "Les  Moeurs  de 
ce  Siecle" — gives  a  juster  notion  of  its  con- 
tents. The  whole  of  society,  as  it  appeared 
to  the  subtle  and  penetrating  gaze  of  La 
Bruyere,  flows  through  its  pages.  In  them, 
Versailles  rises  before  us,  less  in  its  outward 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          127 

form  than  in  its  spiritual  content — its  secret, 
essential  self.  And  the  judgment  which  La 
Bruyere  passes  on  this  vision  is  one  of  wither- 
ing scorn.  His  criticism  is  more  convincing 
than  La  Rochefoucauld's  because  it  is  based 
upon  a  wider  and  a  deeper  foundation.  The 
vanity  which  he  saw  around  him  was  indeed 
the  vanity  of  the  Preacher — the  emptiness, 
the  insignificance,  the  unprofitableness,  of 
worldly  things.  There  was  nothing  too  small 
to  escape  his  terrible  attention,  and  nothing 
too  large.  His  arraignment  passes  from  the 
use  of  rouge  to  the  use  of  torture,  from  the 
hypocrisies  of  false  devotion  to  the  silly  ab- 
surdities of  eccentrics,  from  the  inhumanity 
of  princes,  to  the  little  habits  of  fools.  The 
passage  in  which  he  describes  the  celebra- 
tion of  Mass  in  the  Chapel  of  Versailles, 
where  all  the  courtiers  were  to  be  seen 
turning  their  faces  to  the  King's  throne, 
and  their  backs  to  the  altar  of  God,  shows 
a  spirit  different  indeed  from  that  of  Bossuet 
— a  spirit  not  far  removed  from  the  under- 
mining criticism  of  the  eighteenth  century 
itself.  Yet  La  Bruyere  was  not  a  social 
reformer  nor  a  political  theorist:  he  was 
simply  a  moralist  and  an  observer.  He 
saw  in  a  flash  the  condition  of  the  French 
peasants — 


128  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

"  Certains  animaux  farouches,  des  males 
et  des  femelles,  repandus  par  la  campagne, 
noirs,  livides,  et  tout  brules  du  soleil,  at- 
taches a  la  terre  qu'ils  fouillent  et  qu'ils 
remuent  avec  une  opiniatrete  invincible; 
ils  ont  comme  une  voix  articulee,  et,  quand 
ils  se  levent  sur  leurs  pieds,  ils  montrent 
une  face  humaine:  et  en  effet  ils  sont  des 
hommes" — 

saw  the  dreadful  fact,  noted  it  with  all  the 
intensity  of  his  genius,  and  then  passed  on. 
He  was  not  concerned  with  finding  remedies 
for  the  evils  of  a  particular  society,  but  with 
exposing  the  underlying  evils  of  all  societies. 
He  would  have  written  as  truthful  and  as 
melancholy  a  book  if  he  had  lived  to-day. 

La  Bruyere,  in  the  darkness  of  his  pessi- 
mism, sometimes  suggests  Swift,  especially  in 
his  sarcastically  serious  treatment  of  detail; 
but  he  was  without  the  virulent  bitterness  of 
the  great  Dean.  In  fact  his  indictment  owes 
much  of  its  impressiveness  to  the  sobriety 
with  which  it  is  presented.  There  is  no  rage, 
no  strain,  no  over-emphasis;  one  feels  as  one 
reads  that  this  is  an  impartial  judge.  And, 
more  than  that,  one  feels  that  the  judge  is  not 
only  a  judge,  but  also  a  human  being.  It  is 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          129 

the  human  quality  in  La  Bruyere's  mind 
which  gives  his  book  its  rare  flavour,  so  that 
one  seems  to  hear,  in  these  printed  words, 
across  the  lapse  of  centuries,  the  voice  of  a 
friend.  At  times  he  forgets  his  gloom  and  his 
misanthropy,  and  speaks  with  a  strange  depth 
of  feeling  on  friendship  or  on  love.  "Un  beau 
visage,"  he  murmurs,  "est  le  plus  beau  de 
tous  les  spectacles,  et  l'harmonie  la  plus  douce 
est  le  son  de  voix  de  celle  que  Ton  aime."  And 
then — "fitre  avec  les  gens  qu'on  aime,  cela 
suffit;  rever,  leur  parler,  ne  leur  parler  point, 
penser  a  eux,  penser  a  des  choses  plus  in- 
differentes,  mais  aupres  d'eux  tout  est  egal." 
How  tender  and  moving  the  accent,  yet  how 
restrained!  And  was  ever  more  profundity 
of  intimacy  distilled  into  a  few  simple  words 
than  here — "II  y  a  du  plaisir  a  rencontrer  les 
yeux  de  celui  a  qui  Ton  vient  de  donner"? 
But  then  once  more  the  old  melancholy  seizes 
him.  Even  love  itself  must  end. — "On  guerit 
comme  on  se  console;  on  n'a  pas  dans  le 
cceur  de  quoi  toujours  pleurer  et  toujours 
aimer."  He  is  overwhelmed  by  the  dis- 
appointments of  life.— "Les  choses  les  plus 
souhaitees  n'arrivent  point;  ou,  si  elles  ar- 
rivcnt,  ce  n'est  ni  dans  le  temps  ni  dans  les 
circonstances  ou  elles  auraient  fait  un  ex- 
treme plaisir."  And  life  itself,  what  is  it? 


130  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

how  does  it  pass? — "II  n'y  a  pour  I'homme 
que  trois  evenexnents:  naltre,  vivre,  et  mourir; 
il  ne  se  sent  pas  naitre,  il  souffre  a  mourir,  et 
il  oublie  de  vivre." 

The  pages  of  La  Bruyere — so  brilliant  and 
animated  on  the  surface,  so  sombre  in  their 
fundamental  sense — contain  the  final  sum- 
mary— we  might  almost  say  the  epitaph — of 
the  great  age  of  Louis  XIV.  Within  a  few 
years  of  the  publication  of  his  book  in  its  com- 
plete form  (1694),  the  epoch,  which  had  begun 
in  such  a  blaze  of  splendour  a  generation 
earlier,  entered  upon  its  ultimate  phase  of 
disaster  and  humiliation.  The  political  ambi- 
tions of  the  overweening  king  were  completely 
shattered;  the  genius  of  Marlborough  annihi- 
lated the  armies  of  France;  and  when  peace 
came  at  last  it  came  in  ruin.  The  country  was 
not  only  exhausted  to  the  furthest  possible 
point,  its  recuperation  had  been  made  well- 
nigh  impossible  by  the  fatal  Revocation  of 
the  Edict  of  Nantes,  which,  in  circumstances 
of  the  utmost  cruelty,  had  driven  into  exile 
the  most  industrious  and  independent  por- 
tion of  the  population.  Poverty,  discontent, 
tyranny,  fanaticism — such  was  the  legacy 
that  Louis  left  to  his  country.  Yet  that  was 
not  quite  all.  Though,  during  the  last  years 


THE  AGE  OF  LOUIS  XIV          131 

of  the  reign,  French  literature  achieved  little 
of  lasting  value,  the  triumphs  of  the  earlier 
period  threw  a  new  and  glorious  lustre  over 
the  reputation  of  France.  The  French  tongue 
became  the  language  of  culture  throughout 
Europe.  In  every  department  of  literature, 
French  models  and  French  taste  were  regarded 
as  the  supreme  authorities.  Strange  as  it 
would  have  seemed  to  him,  it  was  not  as  the 
conqueror  of  Holland  nor  as  the  defender  of 
the  Church,  but  as  the  patron  of  Racine  and 
the  protector  of  Moliere  that  the  superb  and 
brilliant  Louis  gained  his  highest  fame,  his 
true  immortality. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

THE  eighteenth  century  in  France  began 
with  Louis  XIV  and  ended  with  the  Revolu- 
tion. It  is  the  period  which  bridges  the 
gulf  between  autocracy  and  self-government, 
between  Roman  Catholicism  and  toleration, 
between  the  classical  spirit  and  the  spirit  of 
the  Romantic  Revival.  It  is  thus  of  immense 
importance  in  the  history  not  only  of  France, 
but  of  the  civilised  world.  And,  from  the 
point  of  view  of  literature,  it  is  also  peculiarly 
interesting.  The  vast  political  and  social 
changes  which  it  inaugurated  were  the  result 
of  a  corresponding  movement  in  the  current 
of  ideas;  and  this  movement  was  begun, 
developed,  and  brought  to  a  triumphant  con- 
clusion by  a  series  of  great  French  writers, 
who  deliberately  put  their  literary  abilities 
to  the  service  of  the  causes  which  they  had 
at  heart.  Thus  the  literature  of  the  epoch 
offers  a  singular  contrast  to  that  of  the  pre- 
ceding one.  While  the  masterpieces  of  the 
Grand  Siecle  served  no  ulterior  purpose, 

132 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     133 

coming  into  being  and  into  immortality 
simply  as  works  of  beauty  and  art,  those  of 
the  eighteenth  century  were  works  of  propa- 
ganda, appealing  with  a  practical  purpose 
to  the  age  in  which  they  were  written — works 
whose  value  does  not  depend  solely  upon 
artistic  considerations.  The  former  were 
static,  the  latter  dynamic.  As  the  century 
progressed,  the  tendency  deepened;  and  the 
literature  of  the  age,  taken  as  a  whole,  pre- 
sents a  spectacle  of  thrilling  dramatic  interest, 
in  which  the  forces  of  change,  at  first  insig- 
nificant, gradually  gather  in  volume,  and  at 
last,  accumulated  into  overwhelming  power, 
carry  all  before  them.  In  pure  literature,  the 
writers  of  the  eighteenth  century  achieved, 
indeed,  many  triumphs;  but  their  great,  their 
peculiar,  triumphs  were  in  the  domain  of 
thought. 

The  movement  had  already  begun  before 
the  death  of  Louis.  The  evils  at  which  La 
Bruyere  had  shuddered  had  filled  the  atten- 
tion of  more  practical  minds.  Among  these 
the  most  remarkable  was  FENELON,  Arch- 
bishop of  Cambray,  who  combined  great 
boldness  of  political  thought  with  the  graces 
of  a  charming  and  pellucid  style.  In  several 
writings,  among  which  was  the  famous  Tele- 
maque — a  book  written  for  the  edification  of 


134  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  young  Due  de  Bourgogne,  the  heir  to  the 
French  throne  — Fenelon  gave  expression  to 
the  growing  reaction  against  the  rigid  autoc- 
racy of  the  government,  and  enunciated  the 
revolutionary  doctrine  that  a  monarch  ex- 
isted for  no  other  purpose  than  the  good  of  his 
people.  The  Due  de  Bourgogne  was  con- 
verted to  the  mild,  beneficent,  and  open- 
minded  views  of  his  tutor;  and  it  is  possible 
that  if  he  had  lived  a  series  of  judicious  re- 
forms might  have  prevented  the  cataclysm  at 
the  close  of  the  century.  But  in  one  impor- 
tant respect  the  mind  of  Fenelon  was  not  in 
accord  with  the  lines  on  which  French  thought 
was  to  develop  for  the  next  eighty  years. 
Though  he  was  among  the  first  to  advocate 
religious  toleration,  he  was  an  ardent,  even  a 
mystical,  Roman  Catholic.  Now  one  of  the 
chief  characteristics  of  the  coming  age  was  its 
scepticism — its  elevation  of  the  secular  as  op- 
posed to  the  religious  elements  in  society,  and 
its  utter  lack  of  sympathy  with  all  forms  of 
mystical  devotion.  Signs  of  this  spirit  also 
had  appeared  before  the  end  of  Louis's  reign. 
As  early  as  1687 — within  a  year  of  the  Revo- 
cation of  the  Edict  of  Nantes — FONTENELLE, 
the  nephew  of  Corneille,  in  his  Histoire  des 
Oracles  attacked  the  miraculous  basis  of 
Christianity  under  the  pretence  of  exposing 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     135 

the  religious  credulity  of  the  ancient  Greeks 
and  Romans.  In  its  mingling  of  the  sprightly 
and  the  erudite,  and  in  the  subdued  irony  of 
its  apparent  submission  to  orthodoxy,  this 
little  book  forestalled  a  method  of  contro- 
versy which  came  into  great  vogue  at  a  later 
date.  But  a  more  important  work,  published 
at  the  very  end  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
was  the  Dictionary  of  BAYLE,  in  which,  amid 
an  enormous  mass  of  learning  poured  out  over 
a  multitude  of  heterogeneous  subjects,  the 
most  absolute  religious  scepticism  is  expressed 
with  unmistakable  emphasis  and  unceasing 
reiteration.  The  book  is  an  extremely  un- 
wieldy one — very  large  and  very  discursive, 
and  quite  devoid  of  style;  but  its  influence 
was  immense;  and  during  the  long  combat  of 
the  eighteenth  century  it  was  used  as  a  kind 
of  armoury,  supplying  many  of  their  sharpest 
weapons  to  the  writers  of  the  time. 

It  was  not,  however,  until  a  few  years  after 
the  death  of  the  great  king  that  a  volume 
appeared  which  contained  a  complete  expres- 
sion of  the  new  spirit,  in  all  its  aspects.  In 
the  Lettres  Persanes  of  MONTESQUIEU  (pub- 
lished 1721)  may  be  discerned  the  germs  of 
the  whole  thought  of  the  eighteenth  century 
in  France.  The  scheme  of  this  charming  and 


136  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

remarkable  book  was  not  original:  some 
Eastern  travellers  were  supposed  to  arrive 
in  Paris,  and  to  describe,  in  a  correspondence 
with  their  countrymen  in  Persia,  the  prin- 
cipal features  of  life  in  the  French  capital. 
But  the  uses  to  which  Montesquieu  put  this 
borrowed  plot  were  all  his  own.  He  made  it 
the  base  for  a  searching  attack  on  the  whole 
system  of  the  government  of  Louis  XIV. 
The  corruption  of  the  Court,  the  privileges  of 
the  nobles,  the  maladministration  of  the 
finances,  the  stupidities  and  barbarisms  of  the 
old  autocratic  regime — these  are  the  topics  to 
which  he  is  perpetually  drawing  his  reader's 
attention.  But  he  does  more  than  this:  his 
criticism  is  not  merely  particular,  it  is  general; 
he  points  out  the  necessarily  fatal  effects  of  all 
despotisms,  and  he  indicates  his  own  concep- 
tion of  what  a  good  constitution  should  be. 
All  these  discussions  are  animated  by  a  purely 
secular  spirit.  He  views  religion  from  an 
outside  standpoint;  he  regards  it  rather  as 
one  of  the  functions  of  administration  than 
as  an  inner  spiritual  force.  As  for  all  the 
varieties  of  fanaticism  and  intolerance,  he 
abhors  them  utterly. 

It  might  be  supposed  that  a  book  containing 
such  original  and  far-reaching  theories  was  a 
solid  substantial  volume,  hard  to  master  and 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     137 

laborious  to  read.  The  precise  opposite  is  the 
case.  Montesquieu  has  dished  up  his  serious 
doctrines  into  a  spicy  story,  full  of  epigrams 
and  light  topical  allusions,  and  romantic 
adventures,  and  fancy  visions  of  the  East. 
Montesquieu  was  a  magistrate;  yet  he  ven- 
tured to  indulge  here  and  there  in  reflections 
of  dubious  propriety,  and  to  throw  over  the 
whole  of  his  book  an  airy  veil  of  voluptuous 
intrigue.  All  this  is  highly  typical  of  the  lit- 
erature of  the  age  which  was  now  beginning. 
The  serious,  formal  tone  of  the  classical 
writers  was  abandoned,  and  was  replaced  by 
a  gay,  unemphatic,  pithy  manner,  in  which 
some  grams  of  light-hearted  licentiousness 
usually  gave  a  flavour  to  the  wit.  The  change 
was  partly  due  to  the  shifting  of  the  centre  of 
society  from  the  elaborate  and  spectacular 
world  of  Versailles  to  the  more  intimate  atmos- 
phere of  the  drawing-rooms  of  Paris.  With 
the  death  of  the  old  king  the  ceremonial  life 
of  the  Court  fell  into  the  background;  and 
the  spirits  of  the  time  flew  off  into  frivolity 
with  a  sense  of  freedom  and  relief.  But  there 
was  another  influence  at  work.  Paradoxical 
as  it  may  sound,  it  was  the  very  seriousness  of 
the  new  writers  which  was  the  real  cause  of 
their  lack  of  decorum.  Their  great  object 
was  to  be  read — and  by  the  largest  possible 


138  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

number  of  readers;  the  old  select  circle  of 
literary  connoisseurs  no  longer  satisfied  them; 
they  were  eager  to  preach  their  doctrines  to  a 
wider  public — to  the  brilliant,  inquisitive,  and 
increasingly  powerful  public  of  the  capital. 
And  with  this  public  no  book  had  a  chance  of 
success  unless  it  was  of  the  kind  that  could  be 
run  through  rapidly,  pleasantly,  on  a  sofa, 
between  dinner  and  the  opera,  and  would 
furnish  the  material  for  spicy  anecdotes  and 
good  talk.  Like  the  jesters  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  the  philosophers  of  the  eighteenth 
century  found  in  the  use  of  pranks  and  buf- 
foonery the  best  way  of  telling  the  truth. 

Until  about  the  middle  of  the  century, 
Montesquieu  was  the  dominating  figure  in 
French  thought.  His  second  book — Consi- 
derations sur  la  Grandeur  et  la  Decadence  des 
Romains — is  an  exceedingly  able  work,  in 
which  a  series  of  interesting  and  occasionally 
profound  historical  reflections  are  expressed  in 
a  style  of  great  brilliance  and  incisiveness. 
Here  Montesquieu  definitely  freed  history 
from  the  medieval  fetters  which  it  had  worn 
even  in  the  days  of  Bossuet,and  considered  the 
development  of  events  from  a  purely  secular 
point  of  view,  as  the  result  of  natural  causes. 
But  his  greatest  work,  over  which  he  spent 
the  greater  part  of  his  life,  and  on  which  his 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     139 

reputation  must  finally  rest,  was  L'Esprit  des 
Lois  (published  in  1748).  The  discussion  of 
this  celebrated  book  falls  outside  the  domain 
of  literature,  and  belongs  rather  to  the  history 
of  political  thought.  It  is  enough  to  say  that 
here  all  Montesquieu's  qualities — his  power  of 
generalisation,  his  freedom  from  prejudice,  his 
rationalism,  his  love  of  liberty  and  hatred  of 
fanaticism,  his  pointed,  epigrammatic  style 
— appear  in  their  most  characteristic  form. 
Perhaps  the  chief  fault  of  the  book  is  that  it  is 
too  brilliant.  When  Madame  du  Deffand  said 
that  its  title  should  have  been  De  I' Esprit  sur 
les  Lois  she  put  her  finger  on  its  weak  spot. 
Montesquieu's  generalisations  are  always 
bold,  always  original,  always  fine;  unfortu- 
nately, they  are  too  often  unsound  into  the 
bargain.  The  fluid  elusive  facts  slip  through 
his  neat  sentences  like  water  in  a  sieve.  His 
treatment  of  the  English  constitution  affords 
an  illustration  of  this.  One  of  the  first  for- 
eigners to  recognise  the  importance  and  to 
study  the  nature  of  English  institutions, 
Montesquieu  nevertheless  failed  to  give  an 
accurate  account  of  them.  He  believed  that 
he  had  found  in  them  a  signal  instance  of  his 
favourite  theory  of  the  beneficial  effects 
produced  by  the  separation  of  the  three 
powers  of  government — the  judicial,  the  legis- 


140  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

lative,  and  the  executive;  but  he  was  wrong. 
In  England,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  powers  of 
the  legislative  and  the  executive  were  inter- 
twined. This  particular  error  has  had  a  curi- 
ous history.  Montesquieu's  great  reputation 
led  to  his  view  of  the  constitution  of  England 
being  widely  accepted  as  the  true  one;  as  such 
it  was  adopted  by  the  American  leaders  after 
the  War  of  Independence;  and  its  influence  is 
plainly  visible  in  the  present  constitution  of 
the  United  States.  Such  is  the  strange  power 
of  good  writing  over  the  affairs  of  men! 

At  about  the  same  time  as  the  publication 
of  the  Lettres  Persanes,  there  appeared  upon 
the  scene  in  Paris  a  young  man  whose  reputa- 
tion was  eventually  destined  far  to  outshine 
that  of  Montesquieu  himself.  This  young 
man  was  Frangois  Arouet,  known  to  the  world 
as  VOLTAIRE.  Curiously  enough,  however, 
the  work  upon  which  Voltaire's  reputation 
was  originally  built  up  has  now  sunk  into 
almost  complete  oblivion.  It  was  as  a  poet, 
and  particularly  as  a  tragic  poet,  that  he  won 
his  fame;  and  it  was  primarily  as  a  poet  that 
he  continued  to  be  known  to  his  contempo- 
raries during  the  first  sixty  years  of  his  life 
(1694-1754).  But  to-day  his  poetry— the 
serious  part  of  it,  at  least, — is  never  read,  and 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     141 

his  tragedies — except  for  an  occasional  revival 
— are  never  acted.  As  a  dramatist  Voltaire  is 
negligible  for  the  very  reasons  that  made  him 
so  successful  in  his  own  day.  It  was  not  his 
object  to  write  great  drama,  but  to  please  his 
audience:  he  did  please  them;  and,  naturally 
enough,  he  has  not  pleased  posterity.  His 
plays  are  melodramas — the  melodramas  of  a 
very  clever  man  with  a  great  command  of 
language,  an  acute  eye  for  stage-effect,  and 
a  consummate  knowledge  of  the  situations 
and  sentiments  which  would  go  down  with  his 
Parisian  public.  They  are  especially  remark- 
able for  their  wretched  psychology.  It  seems 
well-nigh  incredible  that  Voltaire's  paste- 
board imitations  of  humanity  should  ever 
have  held  a  place  side  by  side  with  the  pro- 
found presentments  of  Racine;  yet  so  it  was, 
and  Voltaire  was  acclaimed  as  the  equal — • 
or  possibly  the  triumphant  rival  of  his  prede- 
cessor. All  through  the  eighteenth  century 
this  singular  absence  of  psychological  insight 
may  be  observed. 

The  verse  of  the  plays  is  hardly  better  than 
the  character-drawing.  It  is  sometimes  good 
rhetoric;  it  is  never  poetry.  The  same  may 
be  said  of  La  Henriade,  the  National  Epic 
which  placed  Voltaire,  in  the  eyes  of  his 
admiring  countrymen,  far  above  Milton  and 


142  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Dante,  and,  at  least,  on  a  level  with  Virgil 
and  Homer.  The  true  gifts  displayed  in  this 
unreadable  work  were  not  poetical  at  all,  but 
historical.  The  notes  and  dissertations  ap- 
pended to  it  showed  that  Voltaire  possessed 
a  real  grasp  of  the  principles  of  historical 
method — principles  which  he  put  to  a  better 
use  a  few  years  later  in  his  brilliant  narrative, 
based  on  original  research,  of  the  life  of 
Charles  XII. 

During  this  earlier  period  of  his  activity, 
Voltaire  seems  to  have  been  trying — half  un- 
consciously, perhaps — to  discover  and  to  ex- 
press the  fundamental  quality  of  his  genius. 
What  was  that  quality?  Was  he  first  and 
foremost  a  dramatist,  or  an  epic  poet,  or  a 
writer  of  light  verse,  or  an  historian,  or  even 
perhaps  a  novelist?  In  all  these  directions 
he  was  working  successfully — yet  without 
absolute  success.  For,  in  fact,  at  bottom,  he 
was  none  of  these  things:  the  true  nature  of 
his  spirit  was  not  revealed  in  them.  When 
the  revelation  did  come,  it  came  as  the  result 
of  an  accident.  At  the  age  of  thirty  he  was 
obliged,  owing  to  a  quarrel  with  a  powerful 
nobleman,  to  leave  France  and  take  up  his 
residence  in  England.  The  three  years  that 
he  passed  there  had  an  immense  effect  upon 
his  life.  In  those  days  England  was  very 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     143 

little  known  to  Frenchmen;  the  barrier  which 
had  arisen  during  the  long  war  between  the 
two  peoples  was  only  just  beginning  to  be 
broken  down;  and  when  Voltaire  arrived,  it 
was  almost  in  the  spirit  of  a  discoverer.  What 
he  found  filled  him  with  astonishment  and  ad- 
miration. Here,  in  every  department  of  life, 
were  to  be  seen  all  the  blessings  so  conspicu- 
ously absent  in  France.  Here  were  wealth, 
prosperity,  a  contented  people,  a  cultivated 
nobility,  a  mild  and  just  administration,  and 
a  bursting  energy  which  manifested  itself  in 
a  multitude  of  ways — in  literature,  in  com- 
merce, in  politics,  in  scientific  thought.  And 
all  this  had  come  into  existence  in  a  nation 
which  had  curbed  the  power  of  the  monarchy, 
done  away  with  priestcraft,  established  the 
liberty  of  the  press,  set  its  face  against  every 
kind  of  bigotry  and  narrow-mindedness,  and, 
through  the  means  of  free  institutions,  taken 
up  the  task  of  governing  itself.  The  infer- 
ence was  obvious:  in  France  also,  like. causes 
would  lead  to  like  results.  When  he  was 
allowed  to  return  to  his  own  country,  Voltaire 
published  the  outcome  of  his  observations 
and  reflections  in  his  Lettres  Philosophiqiies, 
where  for  the  first  time  his  genius  displayed 
itself  in  its  essential  form.  The  book  con- 
tains an  account  of  England  as  Voltaire  saw 


144  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

it,  from  the  social  rather  than  from  the  polit- 
ical point  of  view.  English  life  is  described 
in  its  actuality,  detailed,  vivid,  and  various; 
we  are  shown  Quakers  and  members  of 
Parliament,  merchants  and  philosophers;  we 
come  in  for  the  burial  of  Sir  Isaac  Newton; 
we  go  to  a  performance  of  Julius  Ccesar; 
inoculation  is  explained  to  us;  we  are  given 
elaborate  discussions  of  English  literature 
and  English  science,  of  the  speculations  of 
Bolingbroke  and  the  theories  of  Locke.  The 
Letters  may  still  be  read  with  pleasure  and 
instruction;  they  are  written  in  a  delightful 
style,  running  over  with  humour  and  wit, 
revealing  here  and  there  remarkable  powers 
of  narrative,  and  impregnated  through  and 
through  with  a  wonderful  mingling  of  gaiety, 
irony,  and  common  sense.  They  are  journal- 
ism of  genius;  but  they  are  something  more 
besides.  They  are  informed  with  a  high  pur- 
pose, and  a  genuine  love  of  humanity  and  the 
truth.  The  French  authorities  soon  recog- 
nised this;  they  perceived  that  every  page 
contained  a  cutting  indictment  of  their  sys- 
tem of  government;  and  they  adopted  their 
usual  method  in  such  a  case.  The  sale  of  the 
book  was  absolutely  prohibited  throughout 
France,  and  a  copy  of  it  solemnly  burnt  by 
the  common  hangman. 


It  was  only  gradually  that  the  new  views, 
of  which  Montesquieu  and  Voltaire  were  the 
principal  exponents,  spread  their  way  among 
the  public;  and  during  the  first  half  of  the 
century  many  writers  remained  quite  un- 
affected by  them.  Two  of  these — resembling 
each  other  in  this  fact  alone,  that  they 
stood  altogether  outside  the  movement  of 
contemporary  thought,  deserve  our  special 
attention. 

The  mantle  of  Racine  was  generally  sup- 
posed to  have  fallen  on  to  the  shoulders  of 
Voltaire — it  had  not:  if  it  had  fallen  on  to 
any  one's  shoulders  it  was  on  to  those  of 
MARIVAUX.  No  doubt  it  had  become  dimin- 
ished in  the  transit.  Marivaux  was  not  a 
great  tragic  writer;  he  was  not  a  poet;  he 
worked  on  a  much  smaller  scale,  and  with  far 
less  significant  material.  But  he  was  a  true 
dramatist,  a  subtle  psychologist,  and  an  artist 
pure  and  simple.  His  comedies,  too,  move 
according  to  the  same  laws  as  the  tragedies  of 
Racine;  they  preserve  the  same  finished 
symmetry  of  design,  and  leave  upon  the  mind 
the  same  sense  of  unity  and  grace.  But  they 
are  slight,  etherealised,  fantastic;  they  are 
Racine,  as  it  were,  by  moonlight.  All  Mari- 
vaux's  dramas  pass  in  a  world  of  his  own 
invention — a  world  curiously  compounded  of 


146  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

imagination  and  reality.  At  first  sight  one 
can  see  nothing  there  but  a  kind  of  conven- 
tional fantasy,  playing  charmingly  round 
impossible  situations  and  queer  delightful 
personages,  who  would  vanish  in  a  moment 
into  thin  air  at  the  slightest  contact  with 
actual  flesh  and  blood.  But  if  Marivaux  had 
been  simply  fantastic  and  nothing  more,  his 
achievement  would  have  been  insignificant; 
his  great  merit  lies  in  his  exquisite  instinct 
for  psychological  truth.  His  plays  are  like 
Watteau's  pictures,  which,  for  all  the  unre- 
ality of  their  atmosphere,  produce  their  effect 
owing  to  a  mass  of  accurate  observation  and 
a  profound  sense  of  the  realities  of  life.  His 
characters,  like  Watteau's,  seem  to  possess, 
not  quite  reality  itself,  but  the  very  quin- 
tessence of  rarefied  reality — the  distilled  fra- 
grance of  all  that  is  most  refined,  delicate,  and 
enchanting  in  the  human  spirit.  His  Ara- 
mintes,  his  Silvias,  his  Lucidors,  are  purged 
of  the  grossnesses  of  existence;  their  minds 
and  their  hearts  are  miraculously  one;  in 
their  conversations  the  subtleties  of  meta- 
physicians are  blended  with  the  airy  clarities 
of  birds.  Le  Jeu  de  V Amour  et  du  Hasard  is 
perhaps  the  most  perfect  example  of  his  work. 
Here  the  lady  changes  places  with  her  wait- 
ing-maid, while  the  lover  changes  places  with 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     147 

his  valet,  and,  in  this  impossible  framework  of 
symmetrical  complications,  the  whole  action 
spins  itself  out.  The  beauty  of  the  little  piece 
depends  upon  the  infinitely  delicate  art  which 
depicts  each  charmingly  absurd,  minute  tran- 
sition in  the  process  of  delusion,  misunder- 
standing, bewilderment,  and  explanation, 
with  all  the  varieties  of  their  interactions  and 
shimmering  personal  shades.  It  would  be 
difficult  to  find  a  more  exquisite  example  of 
tender  and  discriminating  fidelity  to  the  love- 
liest qualities  in  human  nature  than  the  scene 
in  which  Silvia  realises  at  last  that  she  is  in 
love — and  with  whom.  "Ah!  je  vois  clair 
dans  mon  cceur!"  she  exclaims  at  the  supreme 
moment;  and  the  words  might  stand  as  the 
epitome  of  the  art  of  Marivaux.  Through  all 
the  superfine  convolutions  of  his  fancies  and 
his  coquetries  he  never  loses  sight  for  a 
moment  of  the  clear  truth  of  the  heart. 

While  Marivaux,  to  use  Voltaire's  phrase 
for  him,  was  "weighing  nothings  in  scales  of 
gossamer,"  a  writer  of  a  very  different  calibre 
was  engaged  upon  one  of  the  most  forcible, 
one  of  the  most  actual,  and  one  of  the  hugest 
compositions  that  has  ever  come  from  pen  of 
man.  The  Due  DE  SAINT-SIMON  had  spent 
his  youth  and  middle  life  in  the  thick  of  the 


148  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Court  during  the  closing  years  of  Louis  XTV 
and  the  succeeding  period  of  the  Regency; 
and  he  occupied  his  old  age  with  the  compila- 
tion of  his  MSmoires.  This  great  book  offers 
so  many  points  of  striking  contrast  with  the 
mass  of  French  literature  that  it  falls  into  a 
category  of  its  own;  no  other  work  of  the  same 
outstanding  merit  can  quite  be  compared  to 
it;  for  it  was  the  product  of  what  has  always 
been,  in  France,  an  extremely  rare  phenom- 
enon— an  amateur  in  literature  who  was 
also  a  genius.  Saint-Simon  was  so  far  from 
being  a  professional  man  of  letters  that  he 
would  have  been  shocked  to  hear  himself 
described  as  a  man  of  letters  at  all;  indeed,  it 
might  be  said  with  justice  that  his  only  pro- 
fession was  that  of  a  duke.  It  was  as  a  duke 
— or,  more  correctly,  as  a  Due  et  Pair — that, 
in  his  own  eyes  at  any  rate,  he  lived  and 
moved  and  had  his  being.  It  was  round  his 
position  as  a  duke  that  the  whole  of  his  active 
existence  had  revolved;  it  was  with  the  con- 
sciousness of  his  dukedom  dominating  his 
mind  that  he  sat  down  in  his  retirement  to 
write  his  memoirs.  It  might  seem  that  no 
book  produced  in  such  circumstances  and  by 
such  a  man  could  possibly  be  valuable  or  in- 
teresting. But,  fortunately  for  the  world,  the 
merit  of  books  does  not  depend  upon  the  en- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     149 

lightenment  of  authors.  Saint-Simon  was  a 
man  of  small  intellect,  with  medieval  ideas  as 
to  the  structure  of  society,  with  an  absurd 
belief  in  the  fundamental  importance  of  the 
minutest  class  distinctions,  and  with  an  ob- 
session for  dukedoms  almost  amounting  to 
mania:  but  he  had  in  addition  an  incredibly 
passionate  temperament  combined  with  an  un- 
paralleled power  of  observation;  and  these  two 
qualities  have  made  his  book  immortal. 

Besides  the  intrinsic  merits  of  the  work,  it 
has  the  additional  advantage  of  being  con- 
cerned with  an  age,  which,  of  enthralling  in- 
terest on  its  own  account,  also  happened  to 
be  particularly  suited  to  the  capacities  of  the 
writer.  If  Saint-Simon  had  lived  at  any  other 
time,  his  memoirs  would  have  been  admirable, 
no  doubt,  but  they  would  have  lacked  the 
crowning  excellence  which  they  actually 
possess.  As  it  was,  a  happy  stroke  of  fortune 
placed  him  in  the  one  position  where  he  could 
exercise  to  the  full  his  extraordinary  powers: 
never,  before  or  since,  has  there  been  so  much 
to  observe;  never,  before  or  since,  so  miracu- 
lous an  observer.  For,  at  Versailles,  in  the 
last  years  of  Louis,  Saint-Simon  had  before 
him,  under  his  very  eyes,  as  a  daily  and  hourly 
spectacle,  the  whole  accumulated  energy  of 
France  in  all  its  manifestations;  that  was  what 


150  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

he  saw;  and  that,  by  the  magic  of  his  pen,  is 
what  he  makes  us  see.  Through  the  endless 
succession  of  his  pages  the  enormous  pano- 
rama unrolls  itself,  magnificent,  palpitating, 
alive.  What  La  Bruyere  saw  with  the  spirit- 
ual gaze  of  a  moralist  rushed  upon  the  vision 
of  Saint-Simon  in  all  the  colour,  the  detail,  the 
intensity,  the  frenzy,  of  actual  fact.  He  makes 
no  comments,  no  reflections — or,  if  he  does, 
they  are  ridiculous;  he  only  sees  and  feels. 
Thus,  though  in  the  profundity  of  his  judg- 
ment he  falls  so  infinitely  below  La  Bruyere, 
in  his  character-drawing  he  soars  as  high 
above  him.  His  innumerable  portraits  are 
unsurpassed  in  literature.  They  spring  into 
his  pages  bursting  with  life — individual,  con- 
vincing, complete,  and  as  various  as  humanity 
itself.  He  excels  in  that  most  difficult  art  of 
presenting  the  outward  characteristics  of  per- 
sons, calling  up  before  the  imagination  not 
only  the  details  of  their  physical  appearance, 
but  the  more  recondite  effects  of  their  manner 
and  their  bearing,  so  that,  when  he  has  fin- 
ished, one  almost  feels  that  one  has  met  the 
man.  But  his  excellence  does  not  stop  there. 
It  is  upon  the  inward  creature  that  he  expends 
his  most  lavish  care — upon  the  soul  that  sits 
behind  the  eyelids,  upon  the  purpose  and  the 
passion  that  linger  in  a  gesture  or  betray 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     151 

themselves  in  a  word.  The  joy  that  he  takes 
in  such  descriptions  soon  infects  the  reader, 
who  finds  before  long  that  he  is  being  carried 
away  by  the  ardour  of  the  chase,  and  that  at 
last  he  seizes  upon  the  quivering  quarry  with 
all  the  excitement  and  all  the  fury  of  Saint- 
Simon  himself.  Though  it  would,  indeed,  be 
a  mistake  to  suppose  that  Saint-Simon  was 
always  furious — the  wonderful  portraits  of 
the  Duchesse  de  Bourgogne  and  the  Prince 
de  Conti  are  in  themselves  sufficient  to  dis- 
prove that — yet  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
his  hatreds  exceeded  his  loves,  and  that,  in  his 
character-drawing,  he  was,  as  it  were,  more  at 
home  when  he  detested.  Then  the  victim  is 
indeed  dissected  with  a  loving  hand;  then  the 
details  of  incrimination  pour  out  in  a  multi- 
tudinous stream;  then  the  indefatigable  brush 
of  the  master  darkens  the  deepest  shadows 
and  throws  the  most  glaring  deformities  into 
still  bolder  relief;  then  disgust,  horror,  pity, 
and  ridicule  finish  the  work  which  scorn  and 
indignation  had  begun.  Nor,  in  spite  of  the 
virulence  of  his  method,  do  his  portraits  ever 
sink  to  the  level  of  caricatures.  His  most 
malevolent  exaggerations  are  yet  so  realistic 
that  they  carry  conviction.  When  he  had 
fashioned  to  his  liking  his  terrific  images — his 
Vendome,  his  Noailles,  his  Pontchartrain,  his 


152  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Duchesse  de  Berry,  and  a  hundred  more — he 
never  forgot,  in  the  extremity  of  his  ferocity, 
to  commit  the  last  insult,  and  to  breathe  into 
their  nostrils  the  fatal  breath  of  life. 

And  it  is  not  simply  in  detached  portraits 
that  Saint-Simon's  descriptive  powers  show 
themselves;  they  are  no  less  remarkable  in  the 
evocation  of  crowded  and  elaborate  scenes. 
He  is  a  master  of  movement;  he  can  make 
great  groups  of  persons  flow  and  dispose  them- 
selves and  disperse  again;  he  can  produce  the 
effect  of  a  multitude  under  the  dominion  of 
some  common  agitation,  the  waves  of  excite- 
ment spreading  in  widening  circles,  amid  the 
conflicting  currents  of  curiosity  and  suspicion, 
fear  and  hope.  He  is  assiduous  in  his  de- 
scriptions of  the  details  of  places,  and  invari- 
ably heightens  the  effect  of  his  emotional 
climaxes  by  his  dramatic  management  of  the 
physical  decor.  Thus  his  readers  get  to  know 
the  Versailles  of  that  age  as  if  they  had  lived 
in  it;  they  are  familiar  with  the  great  rooms 
and  the  long  gallery;  they  can  tell  the  way  to 
the  king's  bedchamber,  or  wait  by  the  mys- 
terious door  of  Madame  de  Main  tenon;  or 
remember  which  Prince  had  rooms  opening 
out  on  to  the  Terrace  near  the  Orangery,  and 
which  great  family  had  apartments  in  the 
new  wing.  More  than  this,  Saint-Simon  has 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     153 

the  art  of  conjuring  up — often  in  a  phrase  or 
two — those  curious  intimate  visions  which 
seem  to  reveal  the  very  soul  of  a  place.  How 
much  more  one  knows  about  the  extraordi- 
nary palace — how  one  feels  the  very  pulse  of 
the  machine — when  Saint-Simon  has  shown 
one  in  a  flash  a  door  opening,  on  a  sudden,  at 
dead  of  night,  in  an  unlighted  corridor,  and 
the  haughty  Due  d'Harcourt  stepping  out 
among  a  blaze  of  torches,  to  vanish  again, 
as  swiftly  as  he  had  come,  into  the  mysterious 
darkness! — Or  when  one  has  seen,  amid 
the  cold  and  snow  of  a  cruel  winter,  the 
white  faces  of  the  courtiers  pressed  against 
the  window-panes  of  the  palace,  as  the 
messengers  ride  in  from  the  seat  of  war 
with  their  dreadful  catalogues  of  disasters 
and  deaths! 

Saint-Simon's  style  is  the  precise  counter- 
part of  his  matter.  It  is  coloured  and  vital 
to  the  highest  degree.  It  is  the  style  of  a 
writer  who  does  not  care  how  many  solecisms 
he  commits — how  disordered  his  sentences 
may  be,  how  incorrect  his  grammar,  how 
forced  or  undignified  his  expressions — so  long 
as  he  can  put  on  to  paper  in  black  and  white 
the  passionate  vision  that  is  in  his  mind.  The 
result  is  something  unique  in  French  litera- 
ture. If  Saint-Simon  had  tried  to  write  with 


154  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

academic  correctness — and  even  if  he  had 
succeeded — he  certainly  would  have  spoilt 
his  book.  Fortunately,  academic  correctness 
did  not  interest  him,  while  the  exact  delinea- 
ment  of  his  observations  did.  He  is  not  afraid 
of  using  colloquialisms  which  every  critic  of 
the  time  would  have  shuddered  at,  and  which, 
by  their  raciness  and  flavour,  add  enormously 
to  his  effects.  His  writing  is  also  extremely 
metaphorical;  technical  terms  are  thrown 
in  helter-skelter  whenever  the  meaning  would 
benefit;  and  the  boldest  constructions  at 
every  turn  are  suddenly  brought  into  being. 
In  describing  the  subtle  spiritual  sympathy 
which  existed  between  Fenelon  and  Madame 
de  Guyon,  he  strikes  out  the  unforgettable 
phrase — "leur  sublime  s'amalgama,"  which 
in  its  compression,  its  singularity,  its  vivid- 
ness, reminds  one  rather  of  an  English  Eliza- 
bethan than  a  French  writer  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  The  vast  movement  of  his  sentences 
is  particularly  characteristic.  Clause  follows 
clause,  image  is  piled  upon  image,  the  words 
hurry  out  upon  one  another's  heels  in  clusters, 
until  the  construction  melts  away  under  the 
burning  pressure  of  the  excitement,  to  re-form 
as  best  it  may  while  the  agitated  period  still 
expands  in  endless  ramifications.  His  book 
is  like  a  tropical  forest — luxuriant,  bewilder- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     155 

ing,  enormous — with  the  gayest  humming- 
birds among  the  branches,  and  the  vilest 
monsters  in  the  en-tangled  grass. 

Saint-Simon,  so  far  as  the  influence  of  his 
contemporaries  was  concerned,  might  have 
been  living  in  the  Middle  Ages  or  the  moon. 
At  a  time  when  Voltaire's  fame  was  ringing 
through  Europe,  he  refers  to  him  incidentally 
as  an  insignificant  scribbler,  and  misspells  his 
name.  But  the  combination  of  such  abilities 
and  such  aloofness  was  a  singular  exception, 
becoming,  indeed,  more  extraordinary  and 
improbable  every  day.  For  now  the  move- 
ment which  had  begun  in  the  early  years  of 
the  century  was  entering  upon  a  new  phase. 
The  change  came  during  the  decade  1750-60, 
when,  on  the  one  hand,  it  had  become  obvious 
that  all  the  worst  features  of  the  old  regime 
were  to  be  perpetuated  indefinitely  under  the 
incompetent  government  of  Louis  XV,  and 
when,  on  the  other  hand,  the  generation  which 
had  been  brought  up  under  the  influence  of 
Montesquieu  and  Voltaire  came  to  maturity. 
A  host  of  new  writers,  eager,  positive,  and 
resolute,  burst  upon  the  public,  determined 
to  expose  to  the  uttermost  the  evils  of  the 
existing  system,  and,  if  possible,  to  end 
them.  Henceforward,  until  the  meeting  of 


156  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  States-General  closed  the  period  of 
discussion  and  began  that  of  action,  the 
movement  towards  reform  dominated  French 
literature,  gathering  in  intensity  as  it  pro- 
gressed, and  assuming  at  last  the  proportions 
and  characteristics  of  a  great  organised 
campaign. 

The  ideals  which  animated  the  new  writers 
— the  "Philosophes,"  as  they  came  to  be 
called — may  be  summed  up  in  two  words: 
Reason  and  Humanity.  They  were  the  heirs 
of  that  splendid  spirit  which  had  arisen  in 
Europe  at  the  Renaissance,  which  had  filled 
Columbus  when  he  sailed  for  the  New  World, 
Copernicus  when  he  discovered  the  motion 
of  the  earth,  and  Luther  when  he  nailed  his 
propositions  to  the  church  door  at  Witten- 
berg. They  wished  to  dispel  the  dark  mass  of 
prejudice,  superstition,  ignorance,  and  folly  by 
the  clear  rays  of  knowledge  and  truth;  and  to 
employ  the  forces  of  society  towards  the  bene- 
fit of  all  mankind.  They  found  in  France  an 
incompetent  administration,  a  financial  sys- 
tem at  once  futile  and  unjust,  a  barbarous 
judicial  procedure,  a  blind  spirit  of  religious 
intolerance — they  found  the  traces  of  tyranny, 
caste-privilege,  and  corruption  in  every  branch 
of  public  life;  and  they  found  that  these 
enormous  evils  were  the  result  less  of  vicious- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     157 

ness  than  of  stupidity,  less  of  the  deliberate 
malice  of  kings  or  ministers  than  of  a  long, 
ingrained  tradition  of  narrow-mindedness  and 
inhumanity  in  the  principles  of  government. 
Their  great  object,  therefore,  was  to  produce, 
by  means  of  their  writings,  such  an  awakening 
of  public  opinion  as  would  cause  an  immense 
transformation  in  the  whole  spirit  of  national 
life.  With  the  actual  processes  of  political 
change,  with  the  practical  details  of  political 
machinery,  very  few  of  them  concerned  them- 
selves. Some  of  them — such  as  the  illustrious 
Turgot — believed  that  the  best  way  of  reach- 
ing the  desired  improvement  was  through  the 
agency  of  a  benevolent  despotism;  others — 
such  as  Rousseau — had  in  view  an  elaborate, 
a  priori,  ideal  system  of  government;  but 
these  were  exceptions,  and  the  majority  of  the 
Philosophes  ignored  politics  proper  altogether. 
This  was  a  great  misfortune;  but  it  was 
inevitable.  The  beneficent  changes  which 
had  been  introduced  so  effectively  and  with 
such  comparative  ease  into  the  government  of 
England  had  been  brought  about  by  men 
of  affairs;  in  France  the  men  of  affairs  were 
merely  the  helpless  tools  of  an  autocratic 
machine,  and  the  changes  had  to  owe  their 
origin  to  men  uninstructed  in  affairs — to  men 
of  letters.  Reform  had  to  come  from  the 


158  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

outside,  instead  of  from  within;  and  reform 
of  that  kind  spells  revolution.  Yet,  even 
here,  there  were  compensating  advantages. 
The  changes  in  England  had  been,  for  the 
most  part,  accomplished  in  a  tinkering,  un- 
speculative,  hole-and-corner  spirit;  those  in 
France  were  the  result  of  the  widest  appeal 
to  first  principles,  of  an  attempt,  at  any  rate, 
to  solve  the  fundamental  problems  of  society, 
of  a  noble  and  comprehensive  conception  of 
the  duties  and  destiny  of  man.  This  was 
the  achievement  of  the  Philosophes.  They 
spread  far  and  wide,  not  only  through  France, 
but  through  the  whole  civilised  world;  a 
multitude  of  searching  interrogations  on  the 
most  vital  subjects,  they  propounded  vast 
theories,  they  awoke  new  enthusiasms,  and 
uplifted  new  ideals.  In  two  directions  par- 
ticularly their  influence  has  been  enormous. 
By  their  insistence  on  the  right  of  free  opinion 
and  on  the  paramount  necessity  of  free  specu- 
lation, untrammelled  by  the  fetters  of  ortho- 
doxy and  tradition,  they  established  once  for 
all  as  the  common  property  of  the  human  race 
that  scientific  spirit  which  has  had  such  an 
immense  effect  on  modern  civilisation,  and 
whose  full  import  we  are  still  only  just  begin- 
ning to  understand.  And,  owing  mainly  to 
their  efforts  also,  the  spirit  of  humanity  has 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     159 

come  to  be  an  abiding  influence  in  the  world. 
It  was  they  who,  by  their  relentless  exposure 
of  the  abuses  of  the  French  judicial  system — 
the  scandal  of  arbitrary  imprisonment,  the 
futile  barbarism  of  torture,  the  medieval 
abominations  of  the  penal  code — finally  in- 
stilled into  public  opinion  a  hatred  of  cruelty 
and  injustice  in  all  their  forms;  it  was  they 
who  denounced  the  horrors  of  the  slave- 
trade;  it  was  they  who  unceasingly  lamented 
the  awful  evils  of  war.  So  far  as  the  actual 
content  of  their  thought  was  concerned, 
they  were  not  great  originators.  The  germs 
of  their  most  fruitful  theories  they  found 
elsewhere — chiefly  among  the  thinkers  of 
England;  and,  when  they  attempted  original 
thinking  on  their  own  account,  though  they 
were  bold  and  ingenious,  they  were  apt  also 
to  be  crude.  In  some  sciences — political 
economy,  for  instance,  and  psychology — 
they  led  the  way,  but  attained  to  no  lasting 
achievement.  They  suffered  from  the  same 
faults  as  Montesquieu  in  his  Esprit  des  Lois. 
In  their  love  of  pure  reason,  they  relied  too 
often  on  the  swift  processes  of  argument  for 
the  solution  of  difficult  problems,  and  omitted 
that  patient  investigation  of  premises  upon 
which  the  validity  of  all  argument  depends. 
They  were  too  fond  of  systems,  and  those 


160  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

neatly  constructed  logical  theories  into  which 
everything  may  be  fitted  admirably — except 
the  facts.  In  addition,  the  lack  of  psycho- 
logical insight  which  was  so  common  in  the 
eighteenth  century  tended  to  narrow  then* 
sympathies;  and  in  particular  they  failed 
to  realise  the  beauty  and  significance  of 
religious  and  mystical  states  of  mind.  These 
defects  eventually  produced  a  reaction  against 
their  teaching — a  reaction  during  which  the 
true  value  of  their  work  was  for  a  time 
obscured.  For  that  value  is  not  to  be  looked 
for  in  the  enunciation  of  certain  definite 
doctrines,  but  in  something  much  wider  and 
more  profound.  The  Philosophes  were  im- 
portant not  so  much  for  the  answers  which 
they  gave  as  for  the  questions  which  they 
asked;  then*  real  originality  lay  not  in  their 
thought,  but  in  their  spirit.  They  were  the 
first  great  popularisers.  Other  men  before 
them  had  thought  more  accurately  and  more 
deeply:  they  were  the  first  to  fling  the  light 
of  thought  wide  through  the  world,  to  appeal, 
not  to  the  scholar  and  the  specialist,  but  to 
the  ordinary  man  and  woman,  and  to  proclaim 
the  glories  of  civilisation  as  the  heritage  of 
all  humanity.  Above  all,  they  instilled  a 
new  spirit  into  the  speculations  of  men — the 
spirit  of  hope.  They  believed  ardently  in 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     161 

the  fundamental  goodness  of  mankind,  and 
they  looked  forward  into  the  future  with  the 
certain  expectation  of  the  ultimate  triumph 
of  what  was  best.  Though  in  some  directions 
their  sympathies  were  limited,  their  love  of 
humanity  was  a  profound  and  genuine  feeling 
which  moved  them  to  a  boundless  enthusiasm. 
Though  their  faith  in  creeds  was  small,  their 
faith  in  mankind  was  great.  The  spirit 
which  filled  them  was  well  shown  when, 
during  the  darkest  days  of  the  Terror,  the 
noble  Condorcet,  in  the  hiding-place  from 
which  he  came  forth  only  to  die,  wrote 
his  historical  Sketch  of  the  Progress  of  the 
Human  Mind,  with  its  final  chapter  fore- 
telling the  future  triumphs  of  reason,  and 
asserting  the  unlimited  perfectibility  of  man. 
The  energies  of  the  Philosophes  were  given 
a  centre  and  a  rallying-point  by  the  great 
undertaking  of  the  ENCYCLOPAEDIA,  the  pub- 
lication of  which  covered  a  period  of  thirty 
years  (1751-80).  The  object  of  this  colossal 
work,  which  contained  a  survey  of  human 
activity  in  all  its  branches — political,  scien- 
tific, artistic,  philosophical,  commercial — was 
to  record  in  a  permanent  and  concentrated 
form  the  advance  of  civilisation.  A  multitude 
of  writers  contributed  to  it,  of  varying  merit 
and  of  various  opinions,  but  all  animated  by 


162  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  new  belief  in  reason  and  humanity.  The 
ponderous  volumes  are  not  great  literature; 
their  importance  lies  in  the  place  which  they 
fill  in  the  progress  of  thought,  and  in  their 
immense  influence  in  the  propagation  of  the 
new  spirit.  In  spite  of  its  bulk  the  book 
was  extremely  successful;  edition  after  edition 
was  printed;  the  desire  to  know  and  to  think 
began  to  permeate  through  all  the  grades  of 
society.  Nor  was  it  only  in  France  that  these 
effects  were  visible;  the  prestige  of  French 
literature  and  French  manners  carried  the 
teaching  of  the  Philosophes  all  over  Europe; 
great  princes  and  ministers — Frederick  in 
Prussia,  Catherine  in  Russia,  Pombal  in 
Portugal — eagerly  joined  the  swelling  current; 
enlightenment  was  abroad  in  the  world. 

The  Encyclopaedia  would  never  have  come 
into  existence  without  the  genius,  the  energy, 
and  the  enthusiasm  of  one  man — DIDEROT. 
In  him  the  spirit  of  the  age  found  its 
most  typical  expression.  He  was  indeed  the 
Philosophe — more  completely  than  all  the 
rest  universal,  brilliant,  inquisitive,  sceptical, 
generous,  hopeful,  and  humane.  It  was  he 
who  originated  the  Encyclopaedia,  who,  in 
company  with  Dalembert,  undertook  its 
editorship,  and  who,  eventually  alone,  ac- 
complished the  herculean  task  of  bringing 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     163 

the  great  production,  in  spite  of  obstacle  after 
obstacle — in  spite  of  government  prohibitions, 
lack  of  funds,  desertions,  treacheries,  and  the 
mischances  of  thirty  years — to  a  triumphant 
conclusion.  This  was  the  work  of  his  life;  and 
it  was  work  which,  by  its  very  nature,  could 
leave — except  for  that  long  row  of  neglected 
volumes — no  lasting  memorial.  But  the 
superabundant  spirit  of  Diderot  was  not  con- 
tent with  that:  in  the  intervals  of  this  stu- 
pendous labour,  which  would  have  exhausted 
to  their  last  fibre  the  energies  of  a  lesser  man, 
he  found  time  not  only  to  pour  out  a  constant 
flow  of  writing  in  a  multitude  of  miscellaneous 
forms — in  dramas,  in  art  criticism,  in  philo- 
sophical essays,  and  in  a  voluminous  corres- 
pondence, but  also  to  create  on  the  sly  as  it 
were,  and  without  a  thought  of  publication, 
two  or  three  finished  masterpieces  which  can 
never  be  forgotten.  Of  these,  the  most  im- 
portant is  Le  Neveu  de  Rameau,  where  Dide- 
rot's whole  soul  gushes  out  in  one  clear,  strong, 
sparkling  jet  of  incomparable  prose.  In  the 
sheer  enchantment  of  its  vitality  this  wonder- 
ful little  book  has  certainly  never  been  sur- 
passed. It  enthrals  the  reader  as  completely 
as  the  most  exciting  romance,  or  the  talk 
of  some  irresistibly  brilliant  raconteur.  In- 
deed, the  writing,  with  its  ease,  its  vigour,  its 


164  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

colour,  and  its  rapidity,  might  almost  be  taken 
for  what,  in  fact,  it  purports  to  be — conver- 
sation put  into  print,  were  it  not  for  the 
magical  perfection  of  its  form.  Never  did  a 
style  combine  more  absolutely  the  movement 
of  life  with  the  serenity  of  art.  Every  sen- 
tence is  exciting,  and  every  sentence  is 
beautiful.  The  book  must  have  been  com- 
posed quickly,  without  effort,  almost  off-hand; 
but  the  mind  that  composed  it  was  the  mind 
of  a  master,  who,  even  as  he  revelled  in  the 
joyous  manifestation  of  his  genius,  preserved, 
with  an  instinctive  power,  the  master's  con- 
trol. In  truth,  beneath  the  gay  galaxies  of 
scintillating  thoughts  that  strew  the  pages, 
one  can  discern  the  firm,  warm,  broad  sub- 
stance of  Diderot's  very  self,  underlying  and 
supporting  all.  That  is  the  real  subject  of  a 
book  which  seems  to  have  taken  all  subjects 
for  its  province — from  the  origin  of  music  to 
the  purpose  of  the  universe;  and  the  central 
figure — the  queer,  delightful,  Bohemian  Ra- 
meau,  evoked  for  us  with  such  a  marvellous 
distinctness — is  in  fact  no  more  than  the  reed 
with  many  stops  through  which  Diderot  is 
blowing.  Of  all  his  countrymen,  he  comes 
nearest,  in  spirit  and  in  manner,  to  the  great 
Cure  of  Meudon.  The  rich,  exuberant,  intoxi- 
cating tones  of  Rabelais  vibrate  in  his  voice. 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     165 

He  has — not  all,  for  no  son  of  man  will  ever 
again  have  that;  but  he  has  some  of  Rabelais' 
stupendous  breadth,  and  he  has  yet  more  of 
Rabelais'  enormous  optimism.  His  complete 
materialism — his  disbelief  in  any  Providence 
or  any  immortality — instead  of  depressing 
him,  seems  rather  to  have  given  fresh  buoy- 
ancy to  his  spirit;  if  this  life  on  earth  were  all, 
that  only  served,  in  his  eyes,  to  redouble  the 
intensity  of  its  value.  And  his  enthusiasm 
inspired  him  with  a  philanthropy  unknown  to 
Rabelais — an  active  benevolence  that  never 
tired.  For  indeed  he  was,  above  all  else,  a 
man  of  his  own  age:  a  man  who  could  think 
subtly  and  work  nobly  as  well  as  write  splen- 
didly; who  could  weep  as  well  as  laugh.  He 
is,  perhaps,  a  smaller  figure  than  Rabelais; 
but  he  is  much  nearer  to  ourselves.  And, 
when  we  have  come  to  the  end  of  his  generous 
pages,  the  final  impression  that  is  left  with  us 
is  of  a  man  whom  we  cannot  choose  but  love. 

Besides  Diderot,  the  band  of  the  Philo- 
sophes  included  many  famous  names.  There 
was  the  brilliant  and  witty  mathematician, 
Dalembert;  there  was  the  grave  and  noble 
statesman,  Turgot;  there  was  the  psycholo- 
gist, Condillac;  there  was  the  light,  good- 
humoured  Marmontel;  there  was  the  pene- 


166  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

trating  and  ill-fated  Condorcet.  Helvetius 
and  D'Holbach  plunged  boldly  into  ethics  and 
metaphysics;  while,  a  little  apart,  in  learned 
repose,  Buffon  advanced  the  purest  interests 
of  science  by  his  researches  in  Natural  His- 
tory. As  every  year  passed  there  were  new 
accessions  to  this  great  array  of  writers,  who 
waged  their  war  against  ignorance  and  preju- 
dice with  an  ever-increasing  fury.  A  war  in- 
deed it  was.  On  one  side  were  all  the  forces  of 
intellect;  on  the  other  was  all  the  mass  of 
entrenched  and  powerful  dullness.  In  reply 
to  the  brisk  fire  of  the  Philosophes — argument, 
derision,  learning,  wit — the  authorities  hi 
State  and  Church  opposed  the  more  serious 
artillery  of  censorships,  suppressions,  im- 
prisonments, and  exiles.  There  was  hardly 
an  eminent  writer  in  Paris  who  was  unac- 
quainted with  the  inside  of  the  Conciergerie  or 
the  Bastille.  It  was  only  natural,  therefore, 
that  the  struggle  should  have  become  a  highly 
embittered  one,  and  that  at  times,  in  the  heat 
of  it,  the  party  whose  watchword  was  a  hatred 
of  fanaticism,  should  have  grown  itself  fanati- 
cal. But  it  was  clear  that  the  powers  of 
reaction  were  steadily  losing  ground;  they 
could  only  assert  themselves  spasmodically; 
their  hold  upon  public  opinion  was  slipping 
away.  Thus  the  efforts  of  the  band  of  writers 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     167 

in  Paris  seemed  about  to  be  crowned  with 
success.  But  this  result  had  not  been  achieved 
by  their  efforts  alone.  In  the  midst  of  the 
conflict  they  had  received  the  aid  of  a  power- 
ful auxiliary,  who  had  thrown  himself  with 
the  utmost  vigour  into  the  struggle,  and,  far 
as  he  was  from  the  centre  of  operations,  had 
assumed  supreme  command. 

It  was  Voltaire.  This  great  man  had  now 
entered  upon  the  final,  and  by  far  the  most 
important,  period  of  his  astonishing  career. 
It  is  a  curious  fact  that  if  Voltaire  had  died 
at  the  age  of  sixty  he  would  now  only  be  re- 
membered as  a  writer  of  talent  and  versatility, 
who  had  given  conspicuous  evidence,  in  one 
or  two  works,  of  a  liberal  and  brilliant  intelli- 
gence, but  who  had  enjoyed  a  reputation  in 
his  own  age,  as  a  poet  and  dramatist,  infinitely 
beyond  his  deserts.  He  entered  upon  the 
really  significant  period  of  his  activity  at  an 
age  when  most  men  have  already  sought 
repose.  Nor  was  this  all;  for,  by  a  singular 
stroke  of  fortune,  his  existence  was  prolonged 
far  beyond  the  common  span;  so  that,  in 
spite  of  the  late  hour  of  its  beginning,  the 
most  fruitful  and  important  epoch  of  his 
life  extended  over  a  quarter  of  a  century 
(1754-78).  That  he  ever  entered  upon  this 
last  period  of  his  career  seems  in  itself  to  have 


168  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

depended  as  much  on  accident  as  his  fateful 
residence  in  England.  After  the  publication 
of  the  Lettres  Philosophiques,  he  had  done  very 
little  to  fulfil  the  promise  of  that  work.  He 
had  retired  to  the  country  house  of  Madame 
du  Chatelet,  where  he  had  devoted  him- 
self to  science,  play-writing,  and  the  prepara- 
tion of  a  universal  history.  His  reputation 
had  increased;  for  it  was  in  these  years  that 
he  produced  his  most  popular  tragedies — 
Zaire,  M6rope,  Alzire,  and  Mahomet — while 
a  correspondence  carried  on  in  the  most 
affectionate  terms  with  Frederick  the  Great 
yet  further  added  to  his  prestige;  but  his 
essential  genius  still  remained  quiescent. 
Then  at  last  Madame  du  Chatelet  died  and 
Voltaire  took  the  great  step  of  his  life.  At 
the  invitation  of  Frederick  he  left  France, 
and  went  to  live  as  a  pensioner  of  the  Prus- 
sian king  in  the  palace  at  Potsdam.  But  his 
stay  there  did  not  last  long.  It  seemed  as  if 
the  two  most  remarkable  men  in  Europe 
liked  each  other  so  well  that  they  could  not 
remain  apart — and  so  ill  that  they  could  not 
remain  together.  After  a  year  or  two,  there 
was  the  inevitable  explosion.  Voltaire  fled 
from  Prussia,  giving  to  the  world  before  he 
did  so  one  of  the  most  amusing  jeux  d*  esprit 
ever  written — the  celebrated  Diatribe  du 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     169 

Docteur  Akakia — and,  after  some  hesitation, 
settled  down  near  the  Lake  of  Geneva.  A 
few  years  later  he  moved  into  the  chateau  of 
Ferney,  which  became  henceforward  his 
permanent  abode. 

Voltaire  was  now  sixty  years  of  age.  His 
position  was  an  enviable  one.  His  reputation 
was  very  great,  and  he  had  amassed  a  con- 
siderable fortune,  which  not  only  assured 
him  complete  independence,  but  enabled  him 
to  live  in  his  domains  on  the  large  and  lavish 
scale  of  a  country  magnate.  His  residence 
at  Ferney,  just  on  the  border  of  French  terri- 
tory, put  him  beyond  the  reach  of  government 
interference,  while  he  was  yet  not  too  far 
distant  to  be  out  of  touch  with  the  capital. 
Thus  the  opportunity  had  at  last  come  for  the 
full  display  of  his  powers.  And  those  powers 
were  indeed  extraordinary.  His  character 
was  composed  of  a  strange  amalgam  of  all 
the  most  contradictory  elements  in  human 
nature,  and  it  would  be  difficult  to  name  a 
single  virtue  or  a  single  vice  which  he  did 
not  possess.  He  was  the  most  egotistical  of 
mortals,  and  the  most  disinterested;  he  was 
graspingly  avaricious,  and  profusely  generous ; 
he  was  treacherous,  mischievous,  frivolous, 
and  mean,  yet  he  was  a  firm  friend  and  a  true 
benefactor,  yet  he  was  profoundly  serious 


170  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  inspired  by  the  noblest  enthusiasms. 
Nature  had  carried  these  contradictions  even 
into  his  physical  constitution.  His  health  was 
so  bad  that  he  seemed  to  pass  his  whole  life 
on  the  brink  of  the  grave;  nevertheless  his 
vitality  has  probably  never  been  surpassed 
in  the  history  of  the  world.  Here,  indeed,  was 
the  one  characteristic  which  never  deserted 
him:  he  was  always  active  with  an  insatiable 
activity;  it  was  always  safe  to  say  of  him 
that,  whatever  else  he  was,  he  was  not  at  rest. 
His  long,  gaunt  body,  frantically  gesticulat- 
ing, his  skull-like  face,  with  its  mobile  fea- 
tures twisted  into  an  eternal  grin,  its  piercing 
eyes  sparkling  and  darting — all  this  suggested 
the  appearance  of  a  corpse  galvanised  into  an 
incredible  animation.  But  in  truth  it  was  no 
dead  ghost  that  inhabited  this  strange  tene- 
ment, but  the  fierce  and  powerful  spirit  of  an 
intensely  living  man. 

Some  signs  had  already  appeared  of  the 
form  which  his  activity  was  now  about  to 
take.  During  his  residence  in  Prussia  he  had 
completed  his  historical  Essai  sur  Les  Moeurs, 
which  passed  over  in  rapid  review  the  whole 
development  of  humanity,  and  closed  with  a 
brilliant  sketch  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV. 
This  work  was  highly  original  in  many  ways. 
It  was  the  first  history  which  attempted  to 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     171 

describe  the  march  of  civilisation  in  its  broad- 
est aspects,  which  included  a  consideration  of 
the  great  Eastern  peoples,  which  dealt  rather 
with  the  progress  of  the  arts  and  the  sciences 
than  with  the  details  of  politics  and  wars. 
But  its  chief  importance  lay  in  the  fact  that  it 
was  in  reality,  under  its  historical  trappings, 
a  work  of  propaganda.  It  was  a  counter- 
blast to  Bossuet's  Histoire  Universelle.  That 
book  had  shown  the  world's  history  as  a  part 
of  the  providential  order — a  grand  unfolding 
of  design.  Voltaire's  view  was  very  different. 
To  him  as  to  Montesquieu,  natural  causes 
alone  were  operative  in  history;  but  this 
was  not  all;  in  his  eyes  there  was  one  influ- 
ence which,  from  the  earliest  ages,  had  con- 
tinually retarded  the  progress  of  humanity, 
and  that  influence  was  religious  belief.  Thus 
his  book,  though  far  more  brilliant  and  far 
more  modern  than  that  of  Bossuet,  was  never- 
theless almost  equally  biased.  It  was  history 
with  a  thesis,  and  the  gibe  of  Montesquieu 
was  justifiable.  "Voltaire,"  he  said,  "writes 
history  to  glorify  his  own  convent,  like  any 
Benedictine  monk."  Voltaire's  "convent" 
was  the  philosophical  school  in  Paris;  and  his 
desire  to  glorify  it  was  soon  to  appear  in 
other  directions. 

The  Essai  sur  les  Mosurs  is  an  exceedingly 


172  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

amusing  narrative,  but  it  is  a  long  and  learned 
work  filling  several  volumes,  and  the  fruit  of 
many  years  of  research.  Voltaire  was  deter- 
mined henceforward  to  distil  its  spirit  into 
more  compendious  and  popular  forms.  He 
had  no  more  time  for  elaborate  dissertations; 
he  must  reach  the  public  by  quicker  and 
surer  ways.  Accordingly  there  now  began  to 
pour  into  Paris  a  flood  of  short,  light  booklets 
— essays,  plays,  poems,  romances,  letters, 
tracts — a  multitude  of  writings  infinitely 
varied  in  form  and  scope,  but  all  equally 
irresistible  and  all  equally  bearing  the  un- 
mistakable signs  of  their  origin  at  Ferney. 
Voltaire's  inimitable  style  had  at  last  found 
a  medium  in  which  it  could  display  itself 
in  all  its  charm  and  all  its  brilliance.  The 
pointed,  cutting,  mocking  sentences  laugh  and 
dance  through  his  pages  like  light-toed,  prick- 
eared  elves.  Once  seen,  and  there  is  no  help 
for  it — one  must  follow,  into  whatever  danger- 
ous and  unknown  regions  those  magic  imps 
may  lead.  The  pamphlets  were  of  course 
forbidden,  but  without  effect;  they  were  sold 
in  thousands,  and  new  cargoes,  somehow  or 
other,  were  always  slipping  across  the  frontier 
from  Holland  or  Geneva.  Whenever  a  par- 
ticularly outrageous  one  appeared,  Voltaire 
wrote  off  to  all  his  friends  to  assure  them  that 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     173 

he  knew  nothing  whatever  of  the  production, 
that  it  was  probably  a  translation  from  the 
work  of  an  English  clergyman,  and  that,  in 
short,  every  one  would  immediately  see  from 
the  style  alone  that  it  was — not  his.  An  end- 
less series  of  absurd  pseudonyms  intensified 
the  farce.  Oh  no!  Voltaire  was  certainly 
not  the  author  of  this  scandalous  book. 
How  could  he  be?  Did  not  the  titlepage 
plainly  show  that  it  was  the  work  of  Frere 
Cucufin,  or  the  uncle  of  Abbe  Bazin,  or 
the  Comte  de  Boulainvilliers,  or  the  Emperor 
of  China?  And  so  the  game  proceeded; 
and  so  all  France  laughed;  and  so  all  France 
read. 

Two  forms  of  this  light  literature  Voltaire 
made  especially  his  own.  He  brought  the 
Dialogue  to  perfection;  for  the  form  suited 
him  exactly,  with  its  opportunities  for  the 
rapid  exposition  of  contrary  doctrines,  for 
the  humorous  stultification  of  opponents,  and 
for  witty  repartee.  Into  this  mould  he  has 
poured  some  of  his  finest  materials;  and,  in 
such  pieces  as  Le  Diner  du  Comte  de  Boulain- 
villiers and  Frere  Rigolet  et  I'Empereur  de  la 
Chine  one  finds  the  concentrated  essence  of 
his  whole  work.  Equally  effective  and  equally 
characteristic  is  the  Dictionnaire  Philoso- 
phique,  which  contains  a  great  number  of  very 


174  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

short  miscellaneous  articles  arranged  in  alpha- 
betical order.  This  plan  gave  Voltaire  com- 
plete freedom  both  in  the  choice  of  subjects 
and  in  then*  manipulation;  as  the  spirit 
seized  him  he  could  fly  out  into  a  page  of 
sarcasm  or  speculation  or  criticism  or  buffoon- 
ery, and  such  liberty  was  precisely  to  his 
taste;  so  that  the  book  which  had  first  ap- 
peared as  a  pocket  dictionary — "ce  diable  de 
portatif,"  he  calls  it  in  a  letter  proving  quite 
conclusively  that  he,  at  any  rate,  was  not 
responsible  for  the  wretched  thing — were 
there  not  Hebrew  quotations  in  it?  and  who 
could  accuse  him  of  knowing  Hebrew? — had 
swollen  to  six  volumes  before  he  died. 

The  subjects  of  these  writings  were  very 
various.  Ostensibly  at  least,  they  were  by 
no  means  limited  to  matters  of  controversy. 
Some  were  successful  tragedies,  others  were 
pieces  of  criticism,  others  were  historical 
essays,  others  were  frivolous  short  stories, 
or  vers  de  sodett.  But,  in  all  of  them,  some- 
where or  other,  the  cloven  hoof  was  bound 
to  show  itself  at  last.  Whatever  disguises 
he  might  assume,  Voltaire  in  reality  was 
always  writing  for  his  "convent";  he  was 
pressing  forward,  at  every  possible  oppor- 
tunity, the  great  movement  against  the  old 
regime.  His  attack  covers  a  wide  ground. 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     175 

The  abuses  of  the  financial  system,  the  defects 
in  the  administration  of  justice,  the  futility 
of  the  restraints  upon  trade, — upon  these 
and  a  hundred  similar  subjects  he  poured 
out  an  incessant  torrent  of  gay,  penetrating, 
frivolous,  and  remorseless  words.  But  there 
was  one  theme  to  which  he  was  perpetually 
recurring,  which  forms  the  subject  for  his 
bitterest  jests,  and  which,  in  fact,  dominates 
the  whole  of  his  work.  "Ecrasez  l'infame!" 
was  his  constant  exclamation;  and  the 
"infamous  thing"  which  he  wished  to  see 
stamped  under  foot  was  nothing  less  than 
religion.  The  extraordinary  fury  of  his  at- 
tack on  religion  has,  in  the  eyes  of  many, 
imprinted  an  indelible  stigma  upon  his  name; 
but  the  true  nature  of  his  position  in  this 
matter  has  often  been  misunderstood,  and 
deserves  some  examination. 

Voltaire  was  a  profoundly  irreligious  man. 
In  this  he  resembled  the  majority  of  his 
contemporaries;  but  he  carried  the  quality 
perhaps  to  a  further  pitch  than  any  man  of 
his  age.  For,  with  him,  it  was  not  merely 
the  purely  religious  and  mystical  feelings 
that  were  absent;  he  lacked  all  sympathy 
with  those  vague,  brooding,  emotional  states 
of  mind  which  go  to  create  the  highest  forms 
of  poetry,  music,  and  art,  and  which  are 


176  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

called  forth  into  such  a  moving  intensity  by 
the  beauties  of  Nature.  These  things  Voltaire 
did  not  understand;  he  did  not  even  perceive 
them;  for  him,  in  fact,  they  did  not  exist; 
and  the  notion  that  men  could  be  influenced 
by  them,  genuinely  and  deeply,  he  considered 
to  be  so  absurd  as  hardly  to  need  discussion. 
This  was  certainly  a  great  weakness  in  him — 
a  great  limitation  of  spirit.  It  has  vitiated 
a  large  part  of  his  writings;  and  it  has  done 
more  than  that — it  has  obscured,  to  many  of 
his  readers,  the  real  nature  and  the  real  value 
of  his  work.  For,  combined  with  this  inability 
to  comprehend  some  of  the  noblest  parts 
of  man's  nature,  Voltaire  possessed  other 
qualities  of  high  importance  which  went  far 
to  compensate  for  his  defects.  If  he  was  blind 
to  some  truths,  he  perceived  others  with 
wonderful  clearness;  if  his  sympathies  in 
some  directions  were  atrophied,  in  others 
they  were  sensitive  to  an  extraordinary 
degree.  In  the  light  of  these  considerations 
his  attitude  towards  religion  becomes  easier 
to  understand.  All  the  highest  elements  of 
religion — the  ardent  devotion,  the  individual 
ecstasy,  the  sense  of  communion  with  the 
divine — these  things  he  simply  ignored.  But, 
unfortunately,  in  his  day  there  was  a  side  of 
religion  which,  with  his  piercing  clear-sighted- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     177 

ness,  he  could  not  ignore.  The  spirit  of 
fanaticism  was  still  lingering  in  France;  it 
was  the  spirit  which  had  burst  out  on  the 
Eve  of  St.  Bartholomew,  and  had  dictated 
the  fatal  Revocation  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes. 
In  every  branch  of  life  its  influence  was 
active,  infusing  prejudice,  bitterness,  and 
strife;  but  its  effects  were  especially  terrible 
in  the  administration  of  justice.  It  so  hap- 
pened that  while  Voltaire  was  at  Ferney 
some  glaring  instances  of  this  dreadful  fact 
came  to  light.  A  young  Protestant  named 
Galas  committed  suicide  in  Toulouse,  and, 
owing  to  the  blind  zealotry  of  the  magistrates 
of  the  town,  his  father,  completely  innocent, 
was  found  guilty  of  his  murder  and  broken 
on  the  wheel.  Shortly  afterwards,  another 
Protestant,  Sirven,  was  condemned  in  similar 
circumstances,  but  escaped  to  Ferney.  A  few 
years  later,  two  youths  of  seventeen  were 
convicted  at  Abbeville  for  making  some 
profane  jokes.  Both  were  condemned  to 
have  their  tongues  torn  out  and  to  be  decapi- 
tated; one  managed  to  escape,  the  other  was 
executed.  That  such  things  could  happen 
in  eighteenth-century  France  seems  incredi- 
ble; but  happen  they  did,  and  who  knows  how 
many  more  of  a  like  atrocity?  The  fact  that 
these  three  came  to  light  at  all  was  owing  to 


178  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Voltaire  himself.  But  for  his  penetration,  his 
courage,  and  his  skill,  the  terrible  murder  of 
Galas  would  to  this  day  have  remained  un- 
known, and  the  dreadful  affair  of  Abbeville 
would  have  been  forgotten  in  a  month. 
Different  men  respond  most  readily  to  differ- 
ent stimuli:  the  spectacle  of  cruelty  and 
injustice  bit  like  a  lash  into  the  nerves  of 
Voltaire,  and  plunged  him  into  an  agony 
of  horror.  He  resolved  never  to  rest  until  he 
had  not  only  obtained  reparation  for  these 
particular  acts  of  injustice,  but  had  rooted 
out  for  ever  from  men's  minds  the  supersti- 
tious bigotry  which  made  them  possible.  It 
was  to  attain  this  end  that  he  attacked  with 
such  persistence  and  such  violence  all  religion 
and  all  priestcraft  in  general,  and,  in  particu- 
lar, the  orthodox  dogmas  of  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church.  It  became  the  great  object 
of  his  life  to  convince  public  opinion  that 
those  dogmas  were  both  ridiculous  and  con- 
temptible in  themselves,  and  abominable 
in  their  results.  In  this  we  may  think  him 
right  or  we  may  think  him  wrong;  our 
judgment  will  depend  upon  the  nature  of 
our  own  opinions.  But,  whatever  our  opin- 
ions, we  cannot  think  him  wicked;  for  we 
cannot  doubt  that  the  one  dominating 
motive  in  all  that  he  wrote  upon  the  subject 


of  religion  was  a  passionate  desire  for  the 
welfare  of  mankind. 

Voltaire's  philosophical  views  were  curious. 
While  he  entirely  discarded  the  miraculous 
from  his  system,  he  nevertheless  believed  in 
a  Deity — a  supreme  First  Cause  of  all  the 
phenomena  of  the  universe.  Yet,  when  he 
looked  round  upon  the  world  as  it  was,  the 
evil  and  the  misery  in  it  were  what  seized 
his  attention  and  appalled  his  mind.  The 
optimism  of  so  many  of  his  contemporaries 
appeared  to  him  a  shallow  crude  doctrine  un- 
related to  the  facts  of  existence,  and  it  was  to 
give  expression  to  this  view  that  he  composed 
the  most  famous  of  all  his  works — Candide. 
This  book,  outwardly  a  romance  of  the  most 
flippant  kind,  contains  in  reality  the  essence 
of  Voltaire's  maturest  reflections  upon  human 
life.  It  is  a  singular  fact  that  a  book  which 
must  often  have  been  read  simply  for  the  sake 
of  its  wit  and  its  impropriety,  should  never- 
theless be  one  of  the  bitterest  and  most 
melancholy  that  was  ever  written.  But  it  is 
a  safe  rule  to  make,  that  Voltaire's  meaning 
is  deep  in  proportion  to  the  lightness  of  his 
writing — that  it  is  when  he  is  most  in  earnest 
that  he  grins  most.  And,  in  Candide,  the 
brilliance  and  the  seriousness  alike  reach  their 
climax.  The  book  is  a  catalogue  of  all  the 


180  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

woes,  all  the  misfortunes,  all  the  degrada- 
tions, and  all  the  horrors  that  can  afflict  hu- 
manity; and  throughout  it  Voltaire's  grin  is 
never  for  a  moment  relaxed.  As  catastrophe 
follows  catastrophe,  and  disaster  succeeds 
disaster,  not  only  does  he  laugh  himself  con- 
sumedly,  but  he  makes  his  reader  laugh  no 
less;  and  it  is  only  when  the  book  is  finished 
that  the  true  meaning  of  it  is  borne  in  upon 
the  mind.  Then  it  is  that  the  scintillating 
pages  begin  to  exercise  their  grim  unforget- 
table effect;  and  the  pettiness  and  misery  of 
man  seem  to  borrow  a  new  intensity  from  the 
relentless  laughter  of  Voltaire. 

But  perhaps  the  most  wonderful  thing 
about  Candide  is  that  it  contains,  after  all, 
something  more  than  mere  pessimism — it 
contains  a  positive  doctrine  as  well.  Vol- 
taire's common  sense  withers  the  Ideal;  but 
it  remains  common  sense.  "II  faut  cultiver 
notre  jardin"  is  his  final  word — one  of  the 
very  few  pieces  of  practical  wisdom  ever 
uttered  by  a  philosopher. 

Voltaire's  style  reaches  the  summit  of  its 
perfection  in  Candide;  but  it  is  perfect  in  all 
that  he  wrote.  His  prose  is  the  final  embodi- 
ment of  the  most  characteristic  qualities  of 
the  French  genius.  If  all  that  that  great 
nation  had  ever  done  or  thought  were  abol- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     181 

ished  from  the  world,  except  a  single  sentence 
of  Voltaire's,  the  essence  of  their  achievement 
would  have  survived.  His  writing  brings 
to  a  culmination  the  tradition  that  Pascal 
had  inaugurated  in  his  Lettres  Provinciales : 
clarity,  simplicity,  and  wit — these  supreme 
qualities  it  possesses  in  an  unequalled  degree. 
But  these  qualities,  pushed  to  an  extreme, 
have  also  their  disadvantages.  Voltaire's 
style  is  narrow;  it  is  like  a  rapier — all  point; 
with  such  neatness,  such  lightness,  the  sweep- 
ing blade  of  Pascal  has  become  an  impossi- 
bility. Compared  to  the  measured  march 
of  Bossuet's  sentences,  Voltaire's  sprightly 
periods  remind  one  almost  of  a  pirouette. 
But  the  pirouette  is  Voltaire's — executed 
with  all  the  grace,  all  the  ease,  all  the  latent 
strength  of  a  consummate  dancer;  it  would 
be  folly  to  complain;  yet  it  was  clear  that 
a  reaction  was  bound  to  follow — and  a 
salutary  reaction.  Signs  of  it  were  already 
visible  in  the  colour  and  passion  of  Dide- 
rot's writing;  but  it  was  not  until  the 
nineteenth  century  that  the  great  change 
came. 

Nowhere  is  the  excellence  of  Voltaire's 
style  more  conspicuous  than  in  his  Corre- 
spondence, which  forms  so  large  and  impor- 
tant a  portion  of  his  work.  A  more  delightful 


182  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  a  more  indefatigable  letter-writer  never 
lived.  The  number  of  his  published  letters 
exceeds  ten  thousand;  how  many  more  he 
may  actually  have  written  one  hardly  ven- 
tures to  imagine,  for  the  great  majority  of 
those  that  have  survived  date  only  from  the 
last  thirty  years  of  his  long  life.  The  collec- 
tion is  invaluable  alike  for  the  light  which  it 
throws  upon  Voltaire's  career  and  character, 
and  for  the  extent  to  which  it  reflects  the 
manners,  sentiments,  and  thought  of  the  age. 
For  Voltaire  corresponded  with  all  Europe. 
His  reputation,  already  vast  before  he  settled 
at  Ferney,  rose  after  that  date  to  a  well-nigh 
incredible  height.  No  man  had  wielded  such 
an  influence  since  the  days  when  Bernard  of 
Clairvaux  dictated  the  conduct  of  popes 
and  princes  from  his  monastic  cell.  But, 
since  then,  the  wheel  had  indeed  come  full 
circle!  The  very  antithesis  of  the  Middle 
Ages  was  personified  in  the  strange  old 
creature,  who  in  his  lordly  retreat  by  the 
Lake  of  Geneva  alternately  coquetted  with 
empresses,  received  the  homage  of  statesmen 
and  philosophers,  domineered  over  literature 
in  all  its  branches,  and  laughed  Mother 
Church  to  scorn.  As  the  years  advanced, 
Voltaire's  industry,  which  had  always  been 
astonishing,  continually  increased.  As  if  his 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     183 

intellectual  interests  were  not  enough  to 
occupy  him,  he  took  to  commercial  enter- 
prise, developed  the  resources  of  his  estates, 
and  started  a  successful  colony  of  watch- 
makers at  Ferney.  Every  day  he  worked  for 
long  hours  at  his  desk,  spinning  his  ceaseless 
web  of  tracts,  letters,  tragedies,  and  farces. 
In  the  evening  he  would  discharge  the  func- 
tions of  a  munificent  host,  entertain  the  whole 
neighbourhood  with  balls  and  suppers,  and 
take  part  in  one  of  his  own  tragedies  on  the 
stage  of  his  private  theatre.  Then  a  veritable 
frenzy  would  seize  upon  him;  shutting  himself 
up  in  his  room  for  days  together,  he  would 
devote  every  particle  of  his  terrific  energies  to 
the  concoction  of  some  devastating  dialogue, 
or  some  insidious  piece  of  profanation  for 
his  Dictionnaire  Philosophique.  At  length  his 
fragile  form  would  sink  exhausted — he  would 
be  dying — he  would  be  dead;  and  next  morn- 
ing he  would  be  up  again  as  brisk  as  ever, 
directing  the  cutting  of  the  crops. 

One  day,  quite  suddenly,  he  appeared  in 
Paris,  which  he  had  not  visited  for  nearly 
thirty  years.  His  arrival  was  the  signal 
for  one  of  the  most  extraordinary  manifesta- 
tions of  enthusiasm  that  the  world  has  ever 
seen.  For  some  weeks  he  reigned  in  the 
capital,  visible  and  glorious,  the  undisputed 


184  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

lord  of  the  civilised  universe.  The  climax 
came  when  he  appeared  in  a  box  at  the 
Theatre  Frangais,  to  witness  a  performance 
of  the  latest  of  his  tragedies,  and  the  whole 
house  rose  as  one  man  to  greet  him.  His 
triumph  seemed  to  be  something  more  than 
the  mere  personal  triumph  of  a  frail  old 
mortal;  it  seemed  to  be  the  triumph  of  all 
that  was  noblest  in  the  aspirations  of  the 
human  race.  But  the  fatigue  and  excitement 
of  those  weeks  proved  too  much  even  for 
Voltaire  in  the  full  flush  of  his  eighty-fourth 
year.  An  overdose  of  opium  completed  what 
Nature  had  begun;  and  the  amazing  being 
rested  at  last. 

French  literature  during  the  latter  hah*  of 
the  eighteenth  century  was  rich  in  striking 
personalities.  It  might  have  been  expected 
that  an  age  which  had  produced  both  Diderot 
and  Voltaire  would  hardly  be  able  to  boast 
of  yet  another  star  of  equal  magnitude.  But, 
in  JEAN-JACQUES  ROUSSEAU,  there  appeared 
a  man  in  some  ways  even  more  remarkable 
than  either  of  his  great  contemporaries.  The 
peculiar  distinction  of  Rousseau  was  his 
originality.  Neither  Voltaire  nor  Diderot 
possessed  this  quality  in  a  supreme  degree. 
Voltaire,  indeed,  can  only  claim  to  be  original 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     185 

by  virtue  of  his  overwhelming  common  sense, 
which  enabled  him  to  see  clearly  what  others 
could  only  see  confusedly,  to  strike  without 
fear  where  others  were  only  willing  to  wound; 
but  the  whole  bulk  of  his  thought  really  rested 
on  the  same  foundation  as  that  which  sup- 
ported the  ordinary  conceptions  of  the  aver- 
age man  of  the  day.  Diderot  was  a  far  bolder, 
a  far  more  speculative  thinker;  but  yet, 
though  he  led  the  very  van  of  the  age,  he 
was  always  in  it;  his  originality  was  never 
more  than  a  development — though  it  was 
often  an  extreme  development — of  the  ideas 
that  lay  around  him.  Rousseau's  originality 
went  infinitely  further  than  this.  He  neither 
represented  his  age,  nor  led  it;  he  opposed 
it.  His  outlook  upon  the  world  was  truly 
revolutionary.  In  his  eyes,  the  reforms 
which  his  contemporaries  were  so  busy  intro- 
ducing into  society  were  worse  than  useless — 
the  mere  patching  of  an  edifice  which  would 
never  be  fit  to  live  in.  He  believed  that  it  was 
necessary  to  start  altogether  afresh.  And 
what  makes  him  so  singularly  interesting  a 
figure  is  that,  in  more  than  one  sense,  he  was 
right.  It  was  necessary  to  start  afresh;  and 
the  new  world  which  was  to  spring  from  the 
old  one  was  to  embody,  in  a  multitude  of 
ways,  the  visions  of  Rousseau.  He  was  a 


186  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

prophet,  with  the  strange  inspiration  of 
a  prophet — and  the  dishonour  in  his  own 
country. 

But  inspiration  and  dishonour  are  not  the 
only  characteristics  of  prophets:  as  a  rule, 
they  are  also  highly  confused  in  the  delivery 
of  their  prophecies;  and  Rousseau  was  no 
exception.  In  his  writings,  the  true  gist  of 
his  meaning  seems  to  be  only  partially  re- 
vealed; and  it  is  clear  that  he  himself  was 
never  really  aware  of  the  fundamental  notions 
that  lay  at  the  back  of  his  thought.  Hence 
nothing  can  be  easier  than  to  pull  his  work 
to  pieces,  and  to  demonstrate  beyond  a  doubt 
that  it  is  full  of  fallacies,  inconsistencies,  and 
absurdities.  It  is  very  easy  to  point  out  that 
the  Contrat  Social  is  a  miserable  piece  of 
logic-chopping,  to  pour  scorn  on  the  stilted 
sentiment  and  distorted  morality  of  La  Nou- 
velle  Heloise,  and  finally  to  draw  a  cutting 
comparison  between  Rousseau's  preaching 
and  his  practice,  as  it  stands  revealed  in  the 
Confessions — the  lover  of  independence  who 
never  earned  his  own  living,  the  apostle  of 
equality  who  was  a  snob,  and  the  education- 
ist who  left  his  children  in  the  Foundling 
Hospital.  All  this  has  often  been  done,  and 
no  doubt  will  often  be  done  again;  but  it  is 
futile.  Rousseau  lives,  and  will  live,  a  vast 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY    187 

and  penetrating  influence,  in  spite  of  all  his 
critics.  There  is  something  in  him  that  eludes 
their  foot-rules.  It  is  so  difficult  to  take  the 
measure  of  a  soul! 

Difficult,  indeed;  for,  if  we  examine  the 
doctrine  that  seems  to  be  Rousseau's  funda- 
mental one — that,  at  least,  on  which  he  him- 
self lays  most  stress — here,  too,  we  shall  find 
a  mass  of  error.  Rousseau  was  perpetually 
advocating  the  return  to  Nature.  All  the 
great  evils  from  which  humanity  suffers  are,  he 
declared,  the  outcome  of  civilisation;  the  ideal 
man  is  the  primitive  man — the  untutored 
Indian,  innocent,  chaste,  brave,  who  adores 
the  Creator  of  the  universe  in  simplicity,  and 
passes  his  life  in  virtuous  harmony  with  the 
purposes  of  Nature.  If  we  cannot  hope  to 
reach  quite  that  height  of  excellence,  let  us 
at  least  try  to  get  as  near  it  as  we  can.  So 
far  from  pressing  on  the  work  of  civilisation, 
with  the  Philosophes,  let  us  try  to  forget  that 
we  are  civilised  and  be  natural  instead.  This 
was  the  burden  of  Rousseau's  teaching,  and 
it  was  founded  on  a  complete  misconception 
of  the  facts.  The  noble  Indian  was  a  myth. 
The  more  we  find  out  about  primitive  man, 
the  more  certain  it  becomes  that,  so  far  from 
being  the  ideal  creature  of  Rousseau's  imagi- 
nation, he  was  in  reality  a  savage  whose  whole 


188  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

life  was  dominated,  on  the  one  hand  by  the 
mere  brute  necessities  of  existence,  and  on  the 
other  by  a  complicated  and  revolting  system 
of  superstitions.  Nature  is  neither  simple  nor 
good;  and  all  history  shows  that  the  neces- 
sary condition  for  the  production  of  any  of 
the  really  valuable  things  of  life  is  the  control 
of  Nature  by  man — in  fact,  civilisation.  So 
far,  therefore,  the  Philosophes  were  right;  if 
the  Golden  Age  was  to  have  any  place  at  all  hi 
the  story  of  humanity,  it  must  be,  not  at  the 
beginning,  but  the  end. 

But  Rousseau  was  not,  at  bottom,  con- 
cerned with  the  truth  of  any  historical  theory 
at  all.  It  was  only  because  he  hated  the 
present  that  he  idealised  the  past.  His  primi- 
tive Golden  Age  was  an  imaginary  refuge 
from  the  actual  world  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  What  he  detested  and  condemned 
in  that  world  was  in  reality  not  civilisation, 
but  the  conventionality  of  civilisation — the 
restrictions  upon  the  free  play  of  the  human 
spirit  which  seemed  to  be  inherent  in  civilised 
life.  The  strange  feeling  of  revolt  that  surged 
up  within  him  when  he  contemplated  the 
drawing-rooms  of  Paris,  with  their  brilliance 
and  their  philosophy,  their  intellect  and 
their  culture,  arose  from  a  profounder  cause 
than  a  false  historical  theory,  or  a  defective 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     189 

logical  system,  or  a  mean  personal  jealousy 
and  morbid  pride.  All  these  elements,  no 
doubt,  entered  into  his  feeling — for  Rousseau 
was  a  very  far  from  perfect  human  being; 
but  the  ultimate  source  was  beyond  and 
below  them — in  his  instinctive,  overmastering 
perception  of  the  importance  and  the  dignity 
of  the  individual  soul.  It  was  in  this  per- 
ception that  Rousseau's  great  originality  lay. 
His  revolt  was  a  spiritual  revolt.  In  the 
Middle  Ages  the  immense  significance  of  the 
human  spirit  had  been  realised,  but  it  had 
been  inextricably  involved  in  a  mass  of  theo- 
logical superstition.  The  eighteenth  century, 
on  the  other  hand,  had  achieved  the  great 
conception  of  a  secular  system  of  society; 
but,  in  doing  so,  it  had  left  out  of  account  the 
spiritual  nature  of  man,  who  was  regarded 
simply  as  a  rational  animal  in  an  organised 
social  group.  Rousseau  was  the  first  to  unite 
the  two  views,  to  revive  the  medieval  theory 
of  the  soul  without  its  theological  trappings, 
and  to  believe — half  unconsciously,  perhaps, 
and  yet  with  a  profound  conviction — that 
the  individual,  now,  on  this  earth,  and  in 
himself,  was  the  most  important  thing  in  the 
world. 

This  belief,  no  doubt,  would  have  arisen  in 
Europe,  in  some  way  or  other,  if  Rousseau 


190  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

had  never  lived;  but  it  was  he  who  clothed  it 
with  the  splendour  of  genius,  and,  by  the 
passion  of  his  utterance,  sowed  it  far  and  wide 
in  the  hearts  of  men.  In  two  directions  his 
influence  was  enormous.  His  glowing  con- 
ception of  individual  dignity  and  individual 
rights  as  adhering,  not  to  a  privileged  few, 
but  to  the  whole  mass  of  humanity,  seized 
upon  the  imagination  of  France,  supplied  a 
new  and  potent  stimulus  to  the  movement 
towards  political  change,  and  produced  a  deep 
effect  upon  the  development  of  the  Revolu- 
tion. But  it  is  in  literature,  and  those  emo- 
tions of  real  life  which  find  their  natural 
outlet  in  literature,  that  the  influence  of 
Rousseau's  spirit  may  be  most  clearly  seen. 

It  is  often  lightly  stated  that  the  eighteenth 
century  was  an  unemotional  age.  What,  it 
is  asked,  could  be  more  frigid  than  the  poetry 
of  Pope?  Or  more  devoid  of  true  feeling 
than  the  mockery  of  Voltaire?  But  such  a 
view  is  a  very  superficial  one;  and  it  is  gener- 
ally held  by  persons  who  have  never  given 
more  than  a  hasty  glance  at  the  works  they 
are  so  ready  to  condemn.  It  is  certainly  true 
that  at  first  sight  Pope's  couplets  appear  to 
be  cold  and  mechanical;  but  if  we  look  more 
closely  we  shall  soon  find  that  these  appar- 
ently monotonous  verses  have  been  made  the 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     191 

vehicle  for  some  of  the  most  passionate  feel- 
ings of  disgust  and  animosity  that  ever  agi- 
tated a  human  breast.  As  for  Voltaire,  we 
have  already  seen  that  to  infer  lack  of  feeling 
from  his  epigrams  and  laughter  would  be  as 
foolish  as  to  infer  that  a  white-hot  bar  of 
molten  steel  lacked  heat  because  it  was  not 
red.  The  accusation  is  untenable;  the  age 
that  produced — to  consider  French  literature 
alone — a  Voltaire,  a  Diderot,  and  a  Saint- 
Simon,  cannot  be  called  an  age  without  emo- 
tion. Yet  it  is  clear  that,  in  the  matter  of 
emotion,  a  distinction  of  some  sort  does  exist 
between  that  age  and  this.  The  distinc- 
tion lies  not  so  much  in  the  emotion  itself  as 
in  the  attitude  towards  emotion,  adopted  by  the 
men  of  those  days  and  by  ourselves.  In  the 
eighteenth  century  men  were  passionate — in- 
tensely passionate;  but  they  were  passionate 
almost  unconsciously,  in  a  direct  unreflective 
way.  If  any  one  had  asked  Voltaire  to  analyse 
his  feelings  accurately,  he  would  have  replied 
that  he  had  other  things  to  think  about;  the 
notion  of  paying  careful  attention  to  mere 
feelings  would  have  seemed  to  him  ridiculous. 
And,  when  Saint-Simon  sat  down  to  write 
his  Memoirs,  it  never  occurred  to  him  for  a 
moment  to  give  any  real  account  of  what, 
in  all  the  highly  personal  transactions  that 


192  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

he  describes,  he  intimately  felt.  He  tells  us 
nothing  of  his  private  life;  he  mentions  his 
wife  once,  and  almost  apologises  for  doing 
so;  really,  could  a  gentleman — a  duke — dwell 
upon  such  matters,  and  preserve  his  self- 
respect?  But,  to  us,  it  is  precisely  such 
matters  that  form  the  pivot  of  a  personality 
— the  index  of  a  soul.  A  man's  feelings  are 
his  very  self,  and  it  is  around  them  that  all 
that  is  noblest  and  profoundest  in  our  litera- 
ture seems  naturally  to  centre.  A  great 
novelist  is  one  who  can  penetrate  and  describe 
the  feelings  of  others;  a  great  poet  is  one  who 
can  invest  his  own  with  beauty  and  proclaim 
them  to  the  world.  We  have  come  to  set  a 
value  upon  introspection  which  was  quite  un- 
known in  the  eighteenth  century — unknown, 
that  is,  until  Rousseau,  in  the  most  valuable 
and  characteristic  of  his  works — his  Con- 
fessions— started  the  vast  current  in  literature 
and  in  sentiment  which  is  still  flowing  to-day. 
The  Confessions  is  the  detailed,  intimate, 
complete  history  of  a  soul.  It  describes 
Rousseau's  life,  from  its  beginning  until  its 
maturity,  from  the  most  personal  point  of 
view,  with  no  disguises  or  reticences  of  any 
kind.  It  is  written  with  great  art.  Rous- 
seau's style,  like  his  matter,  foreshadows  the 
future;  his  periods  are  cast  in  a  looser,  larger, 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     193 

more  oratorical  mould  than  those  of  his  con- 
temporaries; his  sentences  are  less  fiery  and 
excitable;  though  he  can  be  witty  when  he 
wishes,  he  is  never  frivolous;  and  a  tone  of 
earnest  intimate  passion  lingers  in  his  fault- 
less rhythms.  With  his  great  powers  of  ex- 
pression he  combined  a  wonderful  aptitude 
for  the  perception  of  the  subtlest  shades  of 
feeling  and  of  mood.  He  was  sensitive  to  an 
extraordinary  degree — with  the  sensitiveness 
of  a  proud,  shy  nature,  unhardened  by  the 
commerce  of  the  world.  There  is,  indeed, 
an  unpleasant  side  to  his  Confessions.  Rous- 
seau, like  most  explorers,  became  obsessed 
by  his  own  discoveries;  he  pushed  the  intro- 
spective method  to  its  farthest  limits;  the 
sanctity  of  the  individual  seemed  to  him  not 
only  to  dignify  the  slightest  idiosyncrasies  of 
temperament  and  character,  but  also,  in  some 
sort  of  way,  to  justify  what  was  positively 
bad.  Thus  his  book  contains  the  germs  of 
that  Byronic  egotism  which  later  became  the 
fashion  all  over  Europe.  It  is  also,  in  parts, 
a  morbid  book.  Rousseau  was  not  content 
to  extenuate  nothing;  his  failings  got  upon 
his  nerves;  and,  while  he  was  ready  to  dilate 
upon  them  himself  with  an  infinite  wealth 
of  detail,  the  slightest  hint  of  a  reflection  on 
his  conduct  from  any  other  person  filled  him 


194  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

with  an  agony  and  a  rage  which,  at  the  end 
of  his  life,  developed  into  madness.  To 
strict  moralists,  therefore,  and  to  purists  in 
good  taste,  the  Confessions  will  always  be 
unpalatable.  More  indulgent  readers  will  find 
in  those  pages  the  traces  of  a  spirit  which, 
with  all  its  faults,  its  errors,  its  diseases, 
deserves  something  more  than  pity — deserves 
almost  love.  At  any  rate,  it  is  a  spirit  singu- 
larly akin  to  our  own.  Out  of  the  far- 
off,  sharp,  eager,  unpoetical,  unpsychological, 
eighteenth  century,  it  speaks  to  us  in  the 
familiar  accents  of  inward  contemplation, 
of  brooding  reminiscence,  of  subtly-shifting 
temperament,  of  quiet  melancholy,  of  vision- 
ary joy.  Rousseau,  one  feels,  was  the  only 
man  of  his  age  who  ever  wanted  to  be  alone. 
He  understood  that  luxury:  understood  the 
fascination  of  silence,  and  the  loveliness  of 
dreams.  He  understood,  too,  the  exquisite 
suggestions  of  Nature,  and  he  never  wrote 
more  beautifully  than  when  he  was  describing 
the  gentle  process  of  her  influences  on  the 
solitary  human  soul.  He  understood  sim- 
plicity: the  charm  of  little  happinesses,  the 
sweetness  of  ordinary  affections,  the  beauty 
of  a  country  face.  The  paradox  is  strange; 
how  was  it  that  it  should  have  been  left  to 
the  morbid,  tortured,  half -crazy  egoist  of  the 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     195 

Confessions  to  lead  the  way  to  such  spiritual 
delicacies,  such  innocent  delights? 

The  paradox  was  too  strange  for  Rousseau's 
contemporaries.  They  could  not  understand 
him.  His  works  were  highly  popular;  he  was 
received  into  the  most  brilliant  circles  in 
Paris;  he  made  friends  with  the  most  eminent 
men  of  the  day;  and  then  ensued  misunder- 
standings, accusations,  quarrels,  and  at  last 
complete  disaster.  Rousseau  vanished  from 
society,  driven  out,  according  to  his  account, 
by  the  treacheries  of  his  friends;  the  victim, 
according  to  their  account,  of  his  own  petty 
jealousies  and  morbid  suspicions.  At  every 
point  in  the  quarrel,  his  friends,  and  such 
great  and  honest  men  as  Diderot  and  Hume 
were  among  them,  seem  to  have  been  in  the 
right;  but  it  seems  no  less  clear  that  they  were 
too  anxious  to  proclaim  and  emphasise  the 
faults  of  a  poor,  unfortunate,  demented  man. 
We  can  hardly  blame  them;  for,  in  their  eyes, 
Rousseau  appeared  as  a  kind  of  mad  dog — 
a  pest  to  society,  deserving  of  no  quarter. 
They  did  not  realise — they  could  not — that 
beneath  the  meanness  and  the  frenzy  that 
were  so  obvious  to  them  was  the  soul  of  a  poet 
and  a  seer.  The  wretched  man  wandered 
for  long  in  Switzerland,  in  Germany,  in 
England,  pursued  by  the  ever-deepening 


196  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

shadows  of  his  maniacal  suspicions.  At  last 
he  returned  to  France,  to  end  his  life,  after 
years  of  lingering  misery,  in  obscurity  and 
despair. 

Rousseau  and  Voltaire  both  died  in  1778 — 
hardly  more  than  ten  years  before  the  com- 
mencement of  the  Revolution.  Into  that 
last  decade  of  the  old  regime  there  seemed  to 
be  concentrated  all  the  ardour,  all  the  hope, 
all  the  excitement,  all  the  brilliance  of  the 
preceding  century.  Had  not  Reason  and 
Humanity  triumphed  at  last?  Triumphed, 
at  any  rate,  in  spirit;  for  who  was  not  con- 
verted? All  that  remained  now  was  the 
final,  quick,  easy  turn  which  would  put  into 
action  the  words  of  the  philosophers  and  make 
this  earth  a  paradise.  And  still  new  visions 
kept  opening  out  before  the  eyes  of  enthusi- 
asts— strange  speculations  and  wondrous  pos- 
sibilities. The  march  of  mind  seemed  so  rapid 
that  the  most  advanced  thinkers  of  yesterday 
were  already  out  of  date.  "Voltaire  est  bigot : 
il  est  deiste,"  exclaimed  one  of  the  wits  of 
Paris,  and  the  sentiment  expressed  the  general 
feeling  of  untrammelled  mental  freedom  and 
swift  progression  which  was  seething  all  over 
the  country.  It  was  at  this  moment  that  the 
production  of  Beaumarchais'  brilliant  com- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY     197 

edy,  Le  Mariage  de  Figaro,  electrified  the  in- 
tellectual public  of  Versailles  and  the  capital. 
In  that  play  the  old  regime  was  presented, 
not  in  the  dark  colours  of  satire,  but  under 
the  sparkling  light  of  frivolity,  gaiety,  and 
idleness — a  vision  of  endless  intrigue  and 
vapid  love-making  among  the  antiquated  re- 
mains of  feudal  privileges  and  social  caste. 
In  this  fairyland  one  being  alone  has  reality 
—Figaro,  the  restless,  fiendishly  clever,  non- 
descript valet,  sprung  from  no  one  knows 
where,  destined  to  no  one  knows  what,  but 
gradually  emerging  a  strange  and  sinister 
profile  among  the  laughter  and  the  flowers. 
"What  have  you  done,  Monsieur  le  Comte," 
he  bursts  out  at  last  to  his  master,  "to  deserve 
all  these  advantages? — I  know.  Vous  vous 
etes  donne  la  peine  de  naitre!"  In  that  sen- 
tence one  can  hear — far  off,  but  distinct — the 
flash  and  snap  of  the  guillotine.  To  those 
happy  listeners,  though,  no  such  sound  was 
audible.  Their  speculations  went  another 
way.  All  was  roseate,  all  was  charming  as  the 
coaches  dashed  through  the  narrow  streets  of 
Paris,  carrying  their  finely  powdered  ladies 
and  gentlemen,  in  silks  and  jewels,  to  the 
assemblies  of  the  night.  Within,  the  candles 
sparkled,  and  the  diamonds,  and  the  eyes  of 
the  company,  sitting  round  in  gilded  delicate 


198  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

chairs.  And  then  there  was  supper,  and  the 
Marquise  was  witty,  and  the  Comte  was 
sententious,  while  yet  newer  vistas  opened  of 
yet  happier  worlds,  dancing  on  endlessly 
through  the  floods  of  conversation  and 
champagne. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  ROMANTIC   MOVEMENT 

THE  French  Revolution  was  like  a  bomb,  to 
the  making  of  which  every  liberal  thinker  and 
writer  of  the  eighteenth  century  had  lent  a 
hand,  and  which,  when  it  exploded,  destroyed 
its  creators.  After  the  smoke  had  rolled  away, 
it  became  clear  that  the  old  regime,  with  its 
despotisms  and  its  persecutions,  had  indeed 
been  abolished  for  ever;  but  the  spirit  of  the 
Philosophes  had  vanished  likewise.  Men's 
minds  underwent  a  great  reaction.  The  tra- 
ditions of  the  last  two  centuries  were  violently 
broken.  In  literature  particularly,  it  seemed 
as  if  the  very  foundations  of  the  art  must  be 
laid  anew;  and,  in  this  task,  if  men  looked  at 
all  for  inspiration  from  the  Past,  it  was 
towards  that  age  which  differed  most  from 
the  age  of  their  fathers — towards  those  dis- 
tant times  before  the  Renaissance,  when  the 
medieval  Church  reigned  supreme  in  Europe. 

But  before  examining  these  new  develop- 
ments more  closely,  one  glance  must  be  given 
at  a  writer  whose  qualities  had  singularly 

199 


200  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

little  to  do  with  his  surroundings.  ANDRE 
CHENIER  passed  the  active  years  of  his  short 
life  in  the  thick  of  the  revolutionary  ferment, 
and  he  was  guillotined  at  the  age  of  thirty- 
two;  but  his  most  characteristic  poems  might 
have  been  composed  in  some  magic  island,  far 
from  the  haunts  of  men,  and  untouched  by 
"the  rumour  of  periods."  He  is  the  only 
French  writer  of  the  eighteenth  century  in 
whom  the  pure  and  undiluted  spirit  of  poetry 
is  manifest.  For  this  reason,  perhaps,  he  has 
often  been  acclaimed  as  the  forerunner  of  the 
great  Romantic  outburst  of  a  generation 
later;  but,  in  reality,  to  give  him  such  a  title 
is  to  misjudge  the  whole  value  of  his  work. 
For  he  is  essentially  a  classic;  with  a  purity, 
a  restraint,  a  measured  and  accomplished  art 
which  would  have  delighted  Boileau,  and 
which  brings  him  into  close  kinship  with 
Racine  and  La  Fontaine.  If  his  metrical 
technique  is  somewhat  looser  than  the  former 
poet's,  it  is  infinitely  less  loose  than  the 
latter's;  and  his  occasional  departures  from 
the  strict  classical  canons  of  versification  are 
always  completely  subordinated  to  the  con- 
trolling balance  of  his  style.  In  his  Eglogues 
the  beauty  of  his  workmanship  often  reaches 
perfection.  The  short  poems  are  Attic  in 
their  serenity  and  their  grace.  It  is  not  the 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     201 

rococo  pseudo-classicism  of  the  later  versifiers 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  it  is  the  delicate 
flavour  of  true  Hellenism  that  breathes  from 
them;  and,  as  one  reads  them,  one  is  re- 
minded alternately  of  Theocritus  and  of 
Keats.  Like  Keats,  Chenier  was  cut  off  when 
he  had  hardly  more  than  given  promise  of 
what  his  achievement  might  have  been.  His 
brief  and  tragic  apparition  in  the  midst  of  the 
Revolution  is  like  that  of  some  lovely  bird 
flitting  on  a  sudden  out  of  the  darkness  and 
the  terror  of  a  tempest,  to  be  overcome  a 
moment  later,  and  whirled  to  destruction. 

The  lines  upon  which  the  Romantic  Move- 
ment was  to  develop  had  no  connection  what- 
ever with  Chenier's  exquisite  art.  Throughout 
French  Literature,  it  is  easy  to  perceive 
two  main  impulses  at  work,  which,  between 
them,  have  inspired  all  the  great  masterpieces 
of  the  language.  On  the  one  hand,  there  is 
that  positive  spirit  of  searching  and  unmiti- 
gated common  sense  which  has  given  French 
prose  its  peculiar  distinction,  which  lies  at  the 
root  of  the  wonderful  critical  powers  of  the 
nation,  and  which  has  produced  that  remark- 
able and  persistent  strain  of  Realism — of 
absolute  fidelity  to  the  naked  truth — common 
to  the  earliest  Fabliaux  of  the  Middle  Ages 


202  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  the  latest  Parisian  novel  of  to-day.  On 
the  other  hand,  there  is  in  French  literature  a 
totally  different — almost  a  contradictory — 
tendency,  which  is  no  less  clearly  marked  and 
hardly  less  important — the  tendency  towards 
pure  Rhetoric.  This  love  of  language  for  its 
own  sake — of  language  artfully  ordered,  splen- 
didly adorned,  moving,  swelling,  irresistible 
— may  be  seen  alike  in  the  torrential  sentences 
of  Rabelais,  in  the  sonorous  periods  of 
Bossuet,  and  in  the  passionate  tirades  of  Cor- 
neille.  With  the  great  masters  of  the  seven- 
teenth century — Pascal,  Racine,  La  Fontaine, 
La  Bruyere — the  two  influences  met,  and 
achieved  a  perfect  balance.  In  their  work, 
the  most  penetrating  realism  is  beautified  and 
ennobled  by  all  the  resources  of  linguistic  art, 
while  the  rhetorical  instinct  is  preserved  from 
pomposity  and  inflation  by  a  supreme  critical 
sense.  With  the  eighteenth  century,  however, 
a  change  came.  The  age  was  a  critical  age — 
an  age  of  prose  and  common  sense;  the 
rhetorical  impulse  faded  away,  to  find  ex- 
pression only  in  melodramatic  tragedy  and 
dull  verse;  and  the  style  of  Voltaire,  so  bril- 
liant and  yet  so  colourless,  so  limited  and 
yet  so  infinitely  sensible,  symbolised  the 
literary  character  of  the  century.  The  Ro- 
mantic Movement  was  an  immense  reaction 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     203 

against  the  realism  which  had  come  to  such 
perfection  in  the  acid  prose  of  Voltaire.  It 
was  a  reassertion  of  the  rhetorical  instinct  in 
all  its  strength  and  in  all  its  forms.  There 
was  no  attempt  simply  to  redress  the  balance; 
no  wish  to  revive  the  studied  perfection  of  the 
classical  age.  The  realistic  spirit  was  almost 
completely  abandoned.  The  pendulum  swung 
violently  from  one  extreme  to  the  other. 

The  new  movement  had  been  already 
faintly  discernible  in  Diderot's  bright  colour- 
ing and  the  oratorical  structure  of  Rousseau's 
writing.  But  it  was  not  until  after  the  Revo- 
lution, in  the  first  years  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, that  the  Romantic  spirit  completely 
declared  itself — in  the  prose  of  CHATEAU- 
BRIAND. Chateaubriand  was,  at  bottom,  a 
rhetorician  pure  and  simple —  a  rhetorician  in 
the  widest  sense  of  the  word.  It  was  not 
merely  that  the  resources  of  his  style  were 
enormous  in  colour,  movement,  and  imagery, 
in  splendour  of  rhythm,  in  descriptive  force; 
but  that  his  whole  caste  of  mind  was  in  itself 
rhetorical,  and  that  he  saw,  felt,  and  thought 
with  the  same  emphasis,  the  same  amplitude, 
the  same  romantic  sensibility  with  which  he 
wrote.  The  three  subjects  which  formed  the 
main  themes  of  all  his  work  and  gave  occasion  for 
his  finest  passages  were  Christianity,  Nature, 


204  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  himself.  His  conception  of  Christianity 
was  the  very  reverse  of  that  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  In  his  Genie  du  Christianisme  and 
his  Martyrs  the  analytical  and  critical  spirit  of 
his  predecessors  has  entirely  vanished;  the  re- 
ligion which  they  saw  simply  as  a  collection  of 
theological  dogmas,  he  envisioned  as  a  living 
creed,  arrayed  in  all  the  hues  of  poetry  and 
imagination,  and  redolent  with  the  mystery  of 
the  past.  Yet  it  may  be  doubted  whether 
Chateaubriand  was  essentially  more  religious 
than  Voltaire.  What  Voltaire  dissected  in 
the  dry  light  of  reason,  Chateaubriand  in- 
vested with  the  cloak  of  his  own  eloquence — 
put  it  up,  so  to  speak,  on  a  platform,  in  a  fine 
attitude,  under  a  tinted  illumination.  He 
lacked  the  subtle  intimacy  of  Faith.  In  his 
descriptions  of  Nature,  too,  the  same  charac- 
teristics appear.  Compared  with  Rousseau's, 
they  are  far  bolder,  far  richer,  composed  on  a 
more  elaborate  and  imposing  scale;  but  they 
are  less  convincing;  while  Rousseau's  land- 
scapes are  often  profoundly  moving,  Chateau- 
briand's are  hardly  ever  more  than  splendidly 
picturesque.  There  is  a  similar  relation  be- 
tween the  egoisms  of  the  two  men.  Chateau- 
briand was  never  tired  of  writing  about 
himself;  and  in  his  long  Memoir -es  d"  Outre 
Tombe — the  most  permanently  interesting  of 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT      205 

his  works — he  gave  a  full  rein  to  his  favourite 
passion.  His  conception  of  himself  was 
Byronic.  He  swells  forth,  in  all  his  pages,  a 
noble,  melancholy,  proud,  sentimental  crea- 
ture whom  every  man  must  secretly  envy 
and  every  woman  passionately  adore.  He 
had  all  the  vanity  of  Rousseau,  but  none  of 
his  honesty.  Rousseau,  at  any  rate,  never 
imposed  upon  himself;  and  Chateaubriand 
always  did.  Thus  the  vision  that  we  have  of 
him  is  of  something  wonderful  but  empty, 
something  striking  but  unreal.  It  is  the 
rhetorician  that  we  see,  and  not  the  man. 

Chateaubriand's  influence  was  very  great. 
Beside  his  high-flowing,  romantic,  imagina- 
tive writings,  the  tradition  of  the  eighteenth 
century  seemed  to  shrivel  up  into  something 
thin,  cold,  and  insignificant.  A  new  and 
dazzling  world  swam  into  the  ken  of  his 
readers — a  world  in  which  the  individual 
reigned  in  glory  amid  the  glowing  panorama 
of  Nature  and  among  the  wondrous  visions  of 
a  remote  and  holy  past.  His  works  became 
at  once  highly  popular,  though  it  was  not 
until  a  generation  later  that  their  full  effect 
was  felt.  Meanwhile,  the  impetus  which  he 
had  started  was  continued  in  the  poems  of 
LAMARTINE.  Here  there  is  the  same  love  of 
Nature,  the  same  religious  outlook,  the  same 


206  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

insistence  on  the  individual  point  of  view; 
but  the  tints  are  less  brilliant,  the  emphasis 
is  more  restrained;  the  rhetorical  impulse 
still  dominates,  but  it  is  the  rhetoric  of 
elegiac  tenderness  rather  than  of  picturesque 
pomp.  A  wonderful  limpidity  of  versifica- 
tion which,  while  it  is  always  perfectly  easy, 
is  never  weak,  and  a  charming  quietude  of 
sentiment  which,  however  near  it  may  seem 
to  come  to  the  commonplace,  always  just 
escapes  it — these  qualities  give  Lamartine 
a  distinguished  place  in  the  literature  of 
France.  They  may  be  seen  in  their  perfec- 
tion in  the  most  famous  of  his  poems,  Le  Lac, 
a  monody  descriptive  of  his  feelings  on  re- 
turning alone  to  the  shores  of  the  lake  where 
he  had  formerly  passed  the  day  with  his  mis- 
tress. And  throughout  all  his  poetical  work 
precisely  the  same  characteristics  are  to  be 
found.  Lamartine's  lyre  gave  forth  an  inex- 
haustible flow  of  melody — always  faultless, 
always  pellucid,  and  always  in  the  same  key. 

During  the  Revolution,  under  the  rule  of 
Napoleon,  and  in  the  years  which  followed 
his  fall,  the  energies  of  the  nation  were  en- 
grossed by  war  and  politics.  During  these 
forty  years  there  are  fewer  great  names  in 
French  literature  than  in  any  other  corre- 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     207 

spending  period  since  the  Renaissance.  At 
last,  however,  about  the  year  1830,  a  new 
generation  of  writers  arose  who  brought  back 
all  the  old  glories  and  triumphantly  proved 
that  the  French  tongue,  so  far  from  having 
exhausted  its  resources,  was  a  fresh  and  living 
instrument  of  extraordinary  power.  These 
writers — as  has  so  often  been  the  case  in 
France — were  bound  together  by  a  common 
literary  creed.  Young,  ardent,  scornful  of 
the  past,  dazzled  by  the  possibilities  of  the 
future,  they  raised  the  standard  of  revolt 
against  the  traditions  of  Classicism,  pro- 
mulgated a  new  aesthetic  doctrine,  and,  after 
a  sharp  struggle  and  great  excitement,  finally 
succeeded  in  completely  establishing  their 
view.  The  change  which  they  introduced 
was  of  enormous  importance,  and  for  this 
reason  the  date  1830  is  a  cardinal  one  in  the 
literature  of  France.  Every  sentence,  every 
verse  that  has  been  written  in  French  since 
then  bears  upon  it,  somewhere  or  other,  the 
imprint  of  the  great  Romantic  Movement 
which  came  to  a  head  in  that  year.  What  it 
was  that  was  then  effected — what  the  main 
differences  are  between  French  literature 
before  1830  and  French  literature  after — 
deserves  some  further  consideration. 

The  Romantic  School — of  which  the  most 


208  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

important  members  were  VICTOR  HUGO, 
ALFRED  DE  VIGNY,  THEOPHILE  GAUTIER, 
ALEXANDRE  DUMAS,  and  ALFRED  DE  MUSSET 
— was,  as  we  have  said,  inspired  by  that 
supremely  French  love  of  Rhetoric  which, 
during  the  long  reign  of  intellect  and  prose 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  had  been  almost 
entirely  suppressed.  The  new  spirit  had  ani- 
mated the  prose  of  Chateaubriand  and  the 
poetry  of  Lamartine;  but  it  was  the  spirit 
only:  the  form  of  both  those  writers  retained 
most  of  the  important  characteristics  of  the 
old  tradition.  It  was  new  wine  in  old  bottles. 
The  great  achievement  of  the  Romantic 
School  was  the  creation  of  new  bottles — of  a 
new  conception  of  form,  in  which  the  vast 
rhetorical  impulse  within  them  might  find  a 
suitable  expression.  Their  actual  innova- 
tions, however,  were  by  no  means  sweeping. 
For  instance,  the  numberless  minute  hard- 
and-fast  metrical  rules  which,  since  the  days 
of  Malherbe,  had  held  French  poetry  in 
shackles,  they  only  interfered  with  to  a  very 
limited  extent.  They  introduced  a  certain 
number  of  new  metres;  they  varied  the 
rhythm  of  the  alexandrine;  but  a  great  mass 
of  petty  and  meaningless  restrictions  re- 
mained untouched,  and  no  real  attempt  was 
made  to  get  rid  of  them  until  more  than  a 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT      209 

generation  had  passed.  Yet  here,  as  else- 
where, what  they  had  done  was  of  the  highest 
importance.  They  had  touched  the  ark  of 
the  covenant  and  they  had  not  been  de- 
stroyed. They  had  shown  that  it  was  possi- 
ble to  break  a  "rule"  and  yet  write  good 
poetry.  This  explains  the  extraordinary 
violence  of  the  Romantic  controversy  over 
questions  of  the  smallest  detail.  When 
Victor  Hugo,  in  the  opening  lines  of  Hernani, 
ventured  to  refer  to  an  "escalier  derobe," 
and  to  put  "escalier"  at  the  end  of  one  line, 
and  "derobe"  at  the  beginning  of  the  next, 
he  was  assailed  with  the  kind  of  virulence 
which  is  usually  reserved  for  the  vilest  of 
criminals.  And  the  abuse  had  a  meaning  in 
it:  it  was  abuse  of  a  revolutionary.  For  in 
truth,  by  the  disposition  of  those  two  words, 
Victor  Hugo  had  inaugurated  a  revolution. 
The  whole  theory  of  "rules"  in  literature — 
the  whole  conception  that  there  were  certain 
definite  traditional  forms  in  existence  which 
were,  absolutely  and  inevitably,  the  best — 
was  shattered  for  ever.  The  new  doctrine 
was  triumphantly  vindicated — that  the  form 
of  expression  must  depend  ultimately,  not  upon 
tradition  nor  yet  upon  a  priori  reasonings, 
but  simply  and  solely  on  the  thing  expressed. 
The  most  startling  and  the  most  complete 


210  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

of  the  Romantic  innovations  related  to  the 
poetic  Vocabulary.  The  number  of  words 
considered  permissible  in  French  poetry  had 
been  steadily  diminishing  since  the  days  of 
Racine.  A  distinction  had  grown  up  between 
words  that  were  "noble"  and  words  that 
were  "bas";  and  only  those  in  the  former 
class  were  admitted  into  poetry.  No  word 
could  be  "noble"  if  it  was  one  ordinarily 
used  by  common  people,  or  if  it  was  a  tech- 
nical term,  or  if,  in  short,  it  was  peculiarly 
expressive;  for  any  such  word  would  inevit- 
ably produce  a  shock,  introduce  mean  asso- 
ciations, and  destroy  the  unity  of  the  verse. 
If  the  sense  demanded  the  use  of  such  a  word, 
a  periphrasis  of  "noble"  words  must  be  em- 
ployed instead.  Racine  had  not  been  afraid 
to  use  the  word  "chien"  in  the  most  exalted 
of  his  tragedies;  but  his  degenerate  suc- 
cessors quailed  before  such  an  audacity.  If 
you  must  refer  to  such  a  creature  as  a  dog, 
you  had  better  call  it  "de  la  fidelite  respec- 
table soutien";  the  phrase  actually  occurs  in 
a  tragedy  of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  is 
clear  that  with  such  a  convention  to  struggle 
against,  no  poetry  could  survive.  Every- 
thing bold,  everything  vigorous,  everything 
surprising,  became  an  impossibility  with  a 
diction  limited  to  the  vaguest,  most  general, 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT      211 

and  most  feebly  pompous  terms.  The  Ro- 
mantics, in  the  face  of  violent  opposition, 
threw  the  doors  of  poetry  wide  open  to  every 
word  in  the  language.  How  great  the  change 
was,  and  what  was  the  nature  of  the  public 
opinion  against  which  the  Romantics  had  to 
fight,  may  be  judged  from  the  fact  that  the 
use  of  the  word  "mouchoir"  during  a  per- 
formance of  Othello  a  few  years  before  1830, 
produced  a  riot  in  the  theatre.  To  such  a 
condition  of  narrowness  and  futility  had  the 
great  Classical  tradition  sunk  at  last! 

The  enormous  influx  of  words  into  the 
literary  vocabulary  which  the  Romantic 
Movement  brought  about  had  two  important 
effects.  In  the  first  place,  the  range  of 
poetical  expression  was  infinitely  increased. 
French  literature  came  out  of  a  little,  cere- 
monious, antiquated  drawing-room  into  the 
open  air.  With  the  flood  of  new  words,  a 
thousand  influences  which  had  never  been 
felt  before  came  into  operation.  Strange- 
ness, contrast,  complication,  immensity,  curi- 
osity, grotesqueness,  fantasy — effects  of  this 
kind  now  for  the  first  time  became  possi- 
ble and  common  in  verse.  But  one  point 
must  be  noticed.  The  abolition  of  the  dis- 
tinction between  words  that  were  "bas" 
and  "noble"  did  not  at  first  lead  (as  might 


212  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

have  beeV  expected)  to  an  increase  of  realism. 
Rather  the  opposite  took  place.  The  Ro- 
mantics loved  the  new  words  not  because 
they  made  easier  the  expression  of  actual 
facts,  but  for  their  power  of  suggestion,  for 
the  effects  of  remoteness,  contrast,  and  multi- 
plicity which  could  be  produced  by  them — 
in  fact,  for  their  rhetorical  force.  The  new 
vocabulary  came  into  existence  as  an  engine 
of  rhetoric,  not  as  an  engine  of  truth.  Never- 
theless— and  this  was  the  second  effect  of  its 
introduction — in  the  long  run  the  realistic 
impulse  in  French  literature  was  also  im- 
mensely strengthened.  The  vocabulary  of 
prose  widened  at  the  same  time  as  that  of 
verse;  and  the  prose  of  the  first  Romantics 
remained  almost  completely  rhetorical.  But 
the  realistic  elements  always  latent  in  prose 
— and  especially  in  French  prose — soon  as- 
serted themselves;  the  vast  opportunities 
for  realistic  description  which  the  enlarged 
vocabulary  opened  out  were  eagerly  seized 
upon;  and  it  was  not  long  before  there  arose 
in  French  literature  a  far  more  elaborate  and 
searching  realism  than  it  had  ever  known 
before. 

It  was,  perhaps,  unfortunate  that  the  main 
struggle  of  the  Romantic  controversy  should 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT      213 

have  been  centred  in  the  theatre.  The  fact 
that  this  was  so  is  an  instance  of  the  singular 
interest  in  purely  literary  questions  which 
has  so  often  been  displayed  by  popular 
opinion  in  France.  The  controversy  was  not 
simply  an  academic  matter  for  connoisseurs 
and  critics  to  decide  upon  in  private;  it  was 
fought  out  in  all  the  heat  of  popular  excite- 
ment on  the  public  stage.  But  the  wild  en- 
thusiasm aroused  by  the  triumphs  of  Dumas 
and  Hugo  in  the  theatre  shows,  in  a  no  less 
striking  light,  the  incapacity  of  contempora- 
ries to  gauge  the  true  significance  of  new  ten- 
dencies in  art.  On  the  whole,  the  dramatic 
achievement  of  the  Romantic  School  was  the 
least  valuable  part  of  their  work.  Hernani, 
the  first  performance  of  which  marked  the 
turning-point  of  the  movement,  is  a  piece  of 
bombastic  melodrama,  full  of  the  stagiest 
clap-trap  and  the  most  turgid  declamation. 
Victor  Hugo  imagined  when  he  wrote  it  that 
he  was  inspired  by  Shakespeare;  if  he  was 
inspired  by  any  one  it  was  by  Voltaire.  His 
drama  is  the  old  drama  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  repainted  in  picturesque  colours;  it 
resembles  those  grotesque  country-houses 
that  our  forefathers  were  so  fond  of,  where 
the  sham-gothic  turrets  and  castellations  ill 
conceal  the  stucco  and  the  pilasters  of  a 


214  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

former  age.  Of  true  character  and  true  pas- 
sion it  has  no  trace.  The  action,  the  inci- 
dents, the  persons — all  alike  are  dominated 
by  considerations  of  rhetoric,  and  of  rhetoric 
alone.  The  rhetoric  has,  indeed,  this  advan- 
tage over  that  of  Zaire  and  Alzire — it  is 
bolder  and  more  highly  coloured;  but  then  it 
is  also  more  pretentious.  All  the  worst  ten- 
dencies of  the  Romantic  Movement  may  be 
seen  completely  displayed  in  the  dramas  of 
Victor  Hugo. 

For  throughout  his  work  that  wonderful 
writer  expressed  in  their  extreme  forms  the 
qualities  and  the  defects  of  his  school.  Above 
all,  he  was  the  supreme  lord  of  words.  In 
sheer  facility,  in  sheer  abundance  of  lan- 
guage, Shakespeare  alone  of  all  the  writers  of 
the  world  can  be  reckoned  his  superior.  The 
bulk  of  his  work  is  very  great,  and  the  nature 
of  it  is  very  various;  but  every  page  bears  the 
mark  of  the  same  tireless  fecundity,  the  same 
absolute  dominion  over  the  resources  of 
speech.  Words  flowed  from  Victor  Hugo 
like  light  from  the  sun.  Nor  was  his  volu- 
bility a  mere  disordered  mass  of  verbiage;  it 
was  controlled,  adorned,  and  inspired  by  an 
immense  technical  power.  When  one  has 
come  under  the  spell  of  that  great  enchanter, 
one  begins  to  believe  that  his  art  is  without 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     215 

limits,  that  with  such  an  instrument  and 
such  a  science  there  is  no  miracle  which  he 
cannot  perform.  He  can  conjure  up  the 
strangest  visions  of  fancy;  he  can  evoke  the 
glamour  and  the  mystery  of  the  past;  he  can 
sing  with  exquisite  lightness  of  the  fugitive 
beauties  of  Nature;  he  can  pour  out,  in  ten- 
derness or  in  passion,  the  melodies  of  love; 
he  can  fill  his  lines  with  the  fire,  the  stress, 
the  culminating  fury,  of  prophetic  denuncia- 
tion; he  can  utter  the  sad  and  secret  ques- 
tionings of  the  human  spirit,  and  give  voice 
to  the  solemnity  of  Fate.  In  the  long  roll 
and  vast  swell  of  his  verse  there  is  something 
of  the  ocean — a  moving  profundity  of  power. 
His  sonorous  music,  with  its  absolute  sure- 
ness  of  purpose,  and  its  contrapuntal  art, 
recalls  the  vision  in  Paradise  Lost  of  him 
who — 

"with  volant  touch 

Fled  and  pursued  transverse  the  resonant 
fugue." 

What  kind  of  mind,  what  kind  of  spirit 
must  that  have  been,  one  asks  in  amaze- 
ment, which  could  animate  with  such  a 
marvellous  perfection  the  enormous  organ 
of  that  voice? 

But  perhaps  it  would  be  best  to  leave  the 


216  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

question  unasked — or  at  least  unanswered. 
For  the  more  one  searches,  the  clearer  it 
becomes  that  the  intellectual  scope  and  the 
spiritual  quality  of  Victor  Hugo  were  very 
far  from  being  equal  to  his  gifts  of  expression 
and  imagination.  He  had  the  powers  of  a 
great  genius  and  the  soul  of  an  ordinary 
man.  But  that  was  not  all.  There  have 
been  writers  of  the  highest  excellence — Saint- 
Simon  was  one  of  them — the  value  of  whose 
productions  have  been  unaffected,  or  indeed 
even  increased,  by  their  personal  inferiority. 
They  could  not  have  written  better,  one 
feels,  if  they  had  been  ten  times  as  noble 
and  twenty  times  as  wise  as  they  actually 
were.  But  unfortunately  this  is  not  so  with 
Victor  Hugo.  His  faults — his  intellectual 
weakness,  his  commonplace  outlook,  his  lack 
of  humour,  his  vanity,  his  defective  taste — 
cannot  be  dismissed  as  irrelevant  and  un- 
important, for  they  are  indissolubly  bound 
up  with  the  very  substance  of  his  work.  It 
was  not  as  a  mere  technician  that  he  wished 
to  be  judged;  he  wrote  with  a  very  different 
intention;  it  was  as  a  philosopher,  as  a 
moralist,  as  a  prophet,  as  a  sublime  thinker, 
as  a  profound  historian,  as  a  sensitive  and 
refined  human  being.  With  a  poet  of  such 
pretensions  it  is  clearly  most  relevant  to 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT      217 

inquire  whether  his  poetry  does,  in  fact, 
reveal  the  high  qualities  he  lays  claim  to,  or 
whether,  on  the  contrary,  it  is  characterised 
by  a  windy  inflation  of  sentiment,  a  showy 
superficiality  of  thought,  and  a  ridiculous 
and  petty  egoism.  These  are  the  unhappy 
questions  which  beset  the  mature  and  re- 
flective reader  of  Victor  Hugo's  works.  To 
the  young  and  enthusiastic  one  the  case  is 
different.  For  him  it  is  easy  to  forget — or 
even  not  to  observe — what  there  may  be  in 
that  imposing  figure  that  is  unsatisfactory 
and  second-rate.  He  may  revel  at  will  in 
the  voluminous  harmonies  of  that  resound- 
ing voice;  by  turns  thrilling  with  indigna- 
tion, dreaming  in  ecstasy,  plunging  into 
abysses,  and  soaring  upon  unimaginable 
heights.  Between  youth  and  age  who  shall 
judge?  Who  decide  between  rapture  and  re- 
flection, enthusiasm  and  analysis?  To  de- 
termine the  precise  place  of  Victor  Hugo  in 
the  hierarchy  of  poets  would  be  difficult  in- 
deed. But  this  much  is  certain:  that  at 
times  the  splendid  utterance  does  indeed 
grow  transfused  with  a  pure  and  inward 
beauty,  when  the  human  frailties  vanish, 
and  all  is  subdued  and  glorified  by  the  high 
purposes  of  art.  Such  passages  are  to  be 
found  among  the  lyrics  of  Les  Feuilles  d'Au- 


218  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

tomne,  Les  Rayons  et  Les  Ombres,  Les  Con- 
templations, in  the  brilliant  descriptions  and 
lofty  imagery  of  La  Legende  des  Siecles, 
in  the  burning  invective  of  Les  Chdtiments. 
None  but  a  place  among  the  most  illustrious 
could  be  given  to  the  creator  of  such  a  stu- 
pendous piece  of  word-painting  as  the  de- 
scription of  the  plain  of  Waterloo  in  the 
latter  volume,  or  of  such  a  lovely  vision  as 
that  in  La  Legende  des  Siecles,  of  Ruth 
looking  up  in  silence  at  the  starry  heaven. 
If  only  the  wondrous  voice  had  always 
spoken  so! 

The  romantic  love  of  vastness,  richness, 
and  sublimity,  and  the  romantic  absorption 
in  the  individual — these  two  qualities  appear 
in  their  extremes  throughout  the  work  of 
Hugo:  in  that  of  ALFRED  DEVIGNY  it  is  the 
first  that  dominates;  in  that  of  ALFRED  DE 
MUSSET,  the  second.  Vigny  wrote  sparingly 
— one  or  two  plays,  a  few  prose  works,  and  a 
small  volume  of  poems;  but  he  produced  some 
masterpieces.  A  far  more  sober  artist  than 
Hugo,  he  was  also  a  far  profounder  thinker, 
and  a  sincerer  man.  His  melancholy,  his 
pessimism,  were  the  outcome  of  no  Byronic 
attitudinising,  but  the  genuine  intimate  feel- 
ings of  a  noble  spirit;  and  he  could  express 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     219 

them  in  splendid  verse.  His  melancholy  was 
touched  with  grandeur,  his  pessimism  with 
sublimity.  In  his  Mowe,  his  Colere  de  Samson, 
his  Maison  du  Berger,  his  Mont  des  Oliviers, 
and  others  of  his  short  reflective  poems,  he 
envisions  man  face  to  face  with  indifferent 
Nature,  with  hostile  Destiny,  with  poisoned 
Love,  and  the  lesson  he  draws  is  the  lesson 
of  proud  resignation.  In  La  Mort  du  Loup, 
the  tragic  spectacle  of  the  old  wolf  driven  to 
bay  and  killed  by  the  hunters  inspires  perhaps 
his  loftiest  verses,  with  the  closing  application 
to  humanity — "Souffre  et  meurs  sans  parler" 
— summing  up  his  sad  philosophy.  No  less 
striking  and  beautiful  are  the  few  short 
stories  in  his  Servitude  et  Grandeur  Mili- 
taires,  in  which  some  heroic  incidents  of 
military  life  are  related  in  a  prose  of  remark- 
able strength  and  purity.  In  the  best  work  of 
Vigny  there  are  no  signs  of  the  strain,  the 
over-emphasis,  the  tendency  towards  the 
grotesque,  always  latent  in  Romanticism; 
its  nobler  elements  are  alone  preserved;  he 
has  achieved  the  grand  style. 

Alfred  de  Musset  presents  a  complete 
contrast.  He  was  the  spoilt  child  of  the 
age — frivolous,  amorous,  sensuous,  charming, 
unfortunate,  and  unhappy;  and  his  poetry 
is  the  record  of  his  personal  feelings,  his 


220  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

varying  moods,  his  fugitive  loves,  his  senti- 
mental despairs. 

"Le  seul  bien  qui  me  reste  ail  monde 
Est  d'avoir  quelquefois  pleure," 

he  exclaims,  with  an  accent  of  regretful 
softness  different  indeed  from  that  of  Vigny. 
Among  much  that  is  feeble,  ill  constructed, 
and  exaggerated  in  his  verse,  strains  of  real 
beauty  and  real  pathos  constantly  recur. 
Some  of  his  lyrics  are  perfect;  the  famous 
song  of  Fortunio  in  itself  entitles  him  to  a 
high  place  among  the  masters  of  the  lan- 
guage; and  in  his  longer  pieces — especially 
in  the  four  Nuits — his  emotion  occasionally 
rises,  grows  transfigured,  and  vibrates  with  a 
strange  intensity,  a  long,  poignant,  haunt- 
ing note.  But  doubtless  his  chief  claim  to 
immortality  rests  upon  his  exquisite  little 
dramas  (both  in  verse  and  prose),  in  which 
the  romance  of  Shakespeare  and  the  fantasy 
of  Marivaux  mingle  with  a  wit,  a  charm,  an 
elegance,  which  are  all  Musset's  own.  In  his 
historical  drama,  Lorenzaccio,  he  attempted  to 
fill  a  larger  canvas,  and  he  succeeded.  Un- 
like the  majority  of  the  Romantics,  Musset 
had  a  fine  sense  of  psychology  and  a  pene- 
trating historical  vision.  In  this  brilliant, 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     221 

vivacious,  and  yet  subtle  tragedy,  he  is  truly 
great. 

We  must  now  glance  at  the  effects  which 
the  Romantic  Movement  produced  upon  the 
art  which  was  destined  to  fill  so  great  a  place 
in  the  literature  of  the  nineteenth  century — 
the  art  of  prose  fiction.  With  the  triumph 
of  Classicism  in  the  seventeenth  century, 
the  novel,  like  all  other  forms  of  literature, 
grew  simplified  and  compressed.  The  huge 
romances  of  Mademoiselle  de  Scudery  were 
succeeded  by  the  delicate  little  stories  of 
Madame  de  Lafayette,  one  of  which — La 
Princesse  de  Cleves — a  masterpiece  of  charm- 
ing psychology  and  exquisite  art,  deserves  to 
be  considered  as  the  earliest  example  of  the 
modern  novel.  All  through  the  eighteenth 
century  the  same  tendency  is  visible.  Manon 
Lescaut,  the  passionate  and  beautiful  romance 
of  1'Abbe  Prevost,  is  a  very  small  book,  con- 
cerned, like  La  Princesse  de  Cleves,  with  two 
characters  only — the  lovers,  whose  varying 
fortunes  make  up  the  whole  action  of  the  tale. 
Precisely  the  same  description  applies  to  the 
subtle  and  brilliant  Adolphe  of  Benjamin 
Constant,  produced  in  the  early  years  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  Even  when  the  frame- 
work was  larger — as  in  Le  Sage's  Gil  Bias 


222  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  Marivaux's  Vie  de  Marianne — the  spirit 
was  the  same;  it  was  the  spirit  of  selection, 
of  simplification,  of  delicate  skill.  Both  the 
latter  works  are  written  in  a  prose  style 
of  deliberate  elegance,  and  both  consist 
rather  of  a  succession  of  small  incidents — 
almost  of  independent  short  stories — than  of 
one  large  developing  whole.  The  culminating 
example  of  the  eighteenth  century  form  of 
fiction  may  be  seen  in  the  Liaisons  Dange- 
reuses  of  Laclos,  a  witty,  scandalous,  and 
remarkably  able  novel,  concerned  with  the 
interacting  intrigues  of  a  small  society  of 
persons,  and  revealing  on  every  page  a  most 
brilliant  and  concentrated  art.  Far  more 
modern,  both  in  its  general  conception  and 
in  the  absolute  realism  of  its  treatment,  was 
Diderot's  La  Religieuse;  but  this  master- 
piece was  not  published  till  some  years  after 
the  Revolution;  and  the  real  honour  of  having 
originated  the  later  developments  in  French 
fiction — as  in  so  many  other  branches  of 
literature — belongs  undoubtedly  to  Rousseau. 
La  Nouvelle  Heloise,  faulty  as  it  is  as  a  work 
of  art,  with  its  feeble  psychology  and  loose 
construction,  yet  had  the  great  merit  of 
throwing  open  whole  new  worlds  for  the 
exploration  of  the  novelist — the  world  of 
nature  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     223 

the  world  of  social  problems  and  all  the  living 
forces  of  actual  life.  The  difference  between 
the  novels  of  Rousseau  and  those  of  Hugo 
is  great;  but  yet  it  is  a  difference  merely  of 
degree.  Les  Miserables  is  the  consummation 
of  the  romantic  conception  of  fiction  which 
Rousseau  had  adumbrated  half  a  century 
before.  In  that  enormous  work,  Hugo 
attempted  to  construct  a  prose  epic  of  modern 
life;  but  the  attempt  was  not  successful.  Its 
rhetorical  caste  of  style,  its  ceaseless  and 
glaring  melodrama,  its  childish  presentments 
of  human  character,  its  endless  digressions 
and — running  through  all  this — its  evidences 
of  immense  and  disordered  power,  make  the 
book  perhaps  the  most  magnificent  failure — 
the  most  "wild  enormity"  ever  produced 
by  a  man  of  genius.  Another  development 
of  the  romantic  spirit  appeared  at  about  the 
same  time  in  the  early  novels  of  George  Sand, 
in  which  the  ardours  of  passionate  love  are 
ecstatically  idealised  in  a  loose  and  lyric  flow 
of  innumerable  words. 

There  can  be  little  doubt  that  if  the  devel- 
opment of  fiction  had  stopped  at  this  point 
the  infusion  into  it  of  the  romantic  spirit 
could  only  have  been  judged  a  disaster.  From 
the  point  of  view  of  art,  such  novels  as  those 
of  Victor  Hugo  and  the  early  works  of  George 


224  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

Sand  were  a  retrogression  from  those  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Manon  Lescaut,  tiny, 
limited,  unambitious  as  it  is,  stands  on  a  far 
higher  level  of  artistic  achievement  than  the 
unreal  and  incoherent  Les  Miserables.  The 
scale  of  the  novel  had  indeed  been  infinitely 
enlarged,  but  the  apparatus  for  dealing 
adequately  with  the  vast  masses  of  new 
material  was  wanting.  It  is  pathetic  to  watch 
the  romantic  novelists  trying  to  infuse  beauty 
and  significance  into  their  subjects  by  means 
of  fine  writing,  lyrical  outbursts,  impassioned 
philosophical  dissertations,  and  all  the  famil- 
iar rhetorical  devices  so  dear  to  them.  The 
inevitable  result  was  something  lifeless,  form- 
less, fantastic;  they  were  on  the  wrong  track. 
The  true  method  for  the  treatment  of  their 
material  was  not  that  of  rhetoric  at  all;  it 
was  that  of  realism.  This  fact  was  discovered 
by  STENDHAL,  who  was  the  first  to  combine 
an  enlarged  view  of  the  world  with  a  plain 
style  and  an  accurate,  unimpassioned,  de- 
tailed examination  of  actual  life.  In  his 
remarkable  novel,  Le  Rouge  et  Le  Noir,  and  in 
some  parts  of  his  later  work,  La  Chartreuse  de 
Par  me,  Stendhal  laid  down  the  lines  on  which 
French  fiction  has  been  developing  ever  since. 
The  qualities  which  distinguish  him  are  those 
which  have  distinguished  all  the  greatest  of 


THE  ROMANTIC   MOVEMENT      225 

his  successors — a  subtle  psychological  insight, 
an  elaborate  attention  to  detail,  and  a  re- 
morseless fidelity  to  the  truth. 

Important  as  Stendhal  is  in  the  history  of 
modern  French  fiction,  he  is  dwarfed  by  the 
colossal  figure  of  BALZAC.  By  virtue  of  his 
enormous  powers,  and  the  immense  quantity 
and  variety  of  his  output,  Balzac  might  be 
called  the  Hugo  of  prose,  if  it  were  not  that 
in  two  most  important  respects  he  presents  a 
complete  contrast  to  his  great  contemporary. 
In  the  first  place,  his  control  of  the  technical 
resources  of  the  language  was  as  feeble  as 
Hugo's  was  mighty.  Balzac's  style  is  bad; 
in  spite  of  the  electric  vigour  that  runs 
through  his  writing,  it  is  formless,  clumsy,  and 
quite  without  distinction;  it  is  the  writing  of 
a  man  who  was  highly  perspicacious,  for- 
midably powerful,  and  vulgar.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  he  possessed  one  great  quality 
which  Hugo  altogether  lacked — the  sense  of 
the  real.  Hugo  was  most  himself  when  he  was 
soaring  on  the  wings  of  fancy  through  the 
empyrean;  Balzac  was  most  himself  when  he 
was  rattling  in  a  hired  cab  through  the  streets 
of  Paris.  He  was  of  the  earth  earthy.  His 
coarse,  large,  germinating  spirit  gave  forth, 
like  the  earth,  a  teeming  richness,  a  solid, 


226  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

palpable  creation.  And  thus  it  was  he  who 
achieved  what  Hugo,  in  Les  Miserables,  had 
in  vain  attempted.  La  ComSdie  Humaine,  as 
he  called  the  long  series  of  his  novels,  which 
forms  in  effect  a  single  work,  presents,  in 
spite  of  its  limitations  and  its  faults,  a  picture 
of  the  France  of  that  age  drawn  on  the  vast 
scale  and  in  the  grand  manner  of  an  epic. 

The  limitations  and  the  faults  of  Balzac's 
work  are,  indeed,  sufficiently  obvious  and 
sufficiently  grave.  The  same  coarseness  of 
fibre  which  appears  in  his  style  made  him 
incapable  of  understanding  the  delicacies  of 
life — the  refined  shades  of  emotion,  the  sub- 
tleties of  human  intercourse.  He  probably 
never  read  Jane  Austen;  but  if  he  had  he 
certainly  would  have  considered  her  an 
utterly  pointless  writer;  and  he  would  have 
been  altogether  at  sea  in  a  novel  by  Mr.  Henry 
James.  The  elusive  things  that  are  so  im- 
portant, the  indecisive  things  that  are  so 
curious,  the  intimate  things  that  are  so 
thrilling — all  these  slipped  through  his  rough, 
matter-of-fact  grasp.  His  treatment  of  the 
relations  between  the  sexes  is  characteristic. 
The  subject  fills  a  great  place  in  his  novels; 
he  approaches  it  with  an  unflinching  bold- 
ness, and  a  most  penetrating  gaze;  yet  he 
never  succeeds  in  giving  a  really  satisfactory 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     227 

presentment  of  the  highest  of  those  relations 
— love.  That  eluded  him:  its  essence  was  too 
subtle,  too  private,  too  transcendental.  No 
one  can  describe  love  who  has  not  the  makings 
of  a  poet  in  him.  And  a  poet  was  the  very 
last  thing  that  Balzac  was. 

But  his  work  does  not  merely  suffer  from 
the  absence  of  certain  good  qualities;  it  is 
also  marred  by  the  presence  of  positively  bad 
ones.  Balzac  was  not  simply  a  realist.  There 
was  a  romantic  vein  in  him,  which  occasion- 
ally came  to  the  surface  with  unfortunate 
results.  When  that  happened,  he  plunged 
into  the  most  reckless  melodrama,  revelled  in 
the  sickliest  sentiment,  or  evolved  the  most 
grotesque  characters,  the  most  fantastic  plots. 
And  these  lapses  occur  quite  indiscriminately. 
Side  by  side  with  some  detailed  and  convinc- 
ing description,  one  comes  upon  glaring  absur- 
dities; in  the  middle  of  some  narrative  of 
extraordinary  actuality,  one  finds  oneself 
among  hissing  villains,  disguises,  poisons,  and 
all  the  paraphernalia  of  a  penny  novelette. 
Balzac's  lack  of  critical  insight  into  his  own 
work  is  one  of  the  most  singular  of  his  char- 
acteristics. He  hardly  seems  to  have  known 
at  all  what  he  was  about.  He  wrote  fever- 
ishly, desperately,  under  the  impulsion  of 
irresistible  genius.  His  conceptions  crowded 


228  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

upon  him  in  vivid,  serried  multitudes — the 
wildest  visions  of  fantasy  mixed  pell-mell  with 
the  most  vital  realisations  of  fact.  It  was  not 
for  him  to  distinguish;  his  concern  was 
simply,  somehow  or  other,  to  get  them  all 
out:  good,  bad,  or  indifferent,  what  did  it 
matter?  The  things  were  in  his  brain;  and 
they  must  be  expressed. 

Fortunately,  it  is  very  easy  for  the  reader 
to  be  more  discriminating  than  Balzac.  The 
alloy  is  not  inextricably  mingled  with  the  pure 
metal — the  chaff  may  be  winnowed  off,  and 
the  grain  left.  His  errors  and  futilities  can- 
not obscure  his  true  achievement — his  evo- 
cation of  multitudinous  life.  The  whole  of 
France  is  crammed  into  his  pages,  and  elec- 
trified there  into  intense  vitality.  The  realism 
of  the  classical  novelists  was  a  purely  psycho- 
logical realism;  it  was  concerned  with  the 
delicately  shifting  states  of  mind  of  a  few 
chosen  persons,  and  with  nothing  else.  Bal- 
zac worked  on  a  very  different  plan.  He 
neglected  the  subtleties  of  the  spirit,  and 
devoted  himself  instead  to  displaying  the 
immense  interest  that  lay  in  those  prosaic 
circumstances  of  existence  which  the  older 
writers  had  ignored.  He  showed  with  wonder- 
ful force  that  the  mere  common  details  of 
everyday  life  were  filled  with  drama,  that,  to 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     229 

him  who  had  eyes  to  see,  there  might  be 
significance  in  a  ready-made  suit  of  clothes, 
and  passion  in  the  furniture  of  a  boarding- 
house.  Money  in  particular  gave  him  an 
unending  theme.  There  is  hardly  a  char- 
acter in  the  whole  vast  range  of  his  creation 
of  whose  income  we  are  not  exactly  informed; 
and  it  might  almost  be  said  that  the  only 
definite  moral  that  can  be  drawn  from  La 
Comedie  Humaine  is  that  the  importance  of 
money  can  never  be  over-estimated.  The 
classical  writers  preferred  to  leave  such  mat- 
ters to  the  imagination  of  the  reader;  it  was 
Balzac's  great  object  to  leave  nothing  to  the 
imagination  of  the  reader.  By  ceaseless  effort, 
by  infinite  care,  by  elaborate  attention  to  the 
minutest  details,  he  would  describe  all.  He 
brought  an  encyclopaedic  knowledge  to  bear 
upon  his  task;  he  can  give  an  exact  account 
of  the  machinery  of  a  provincial  printing- 
press;  he  can  write  a  dissertation  on  the 
methods  of  military  organisation;  he  can 
reveal  the  secret  springs  in  the  mechanism  of 
Paris  journalism;  he  is  absolutely  at  home  in 
the  fraudulent  transactions  of  money-makers, 
the  methods  of  usurers,  the  operations  of 
high  finance.  And  into  all  this  mass  of 
details  he  can  infuse  the  spirit  of  life.  Per- 
haps his  masterpiece  in  realistic  description 


230  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

is  his  account  of  La  Maison  Vauquer — a  low 
boarding-house,  to  which  he  devotes  page 
after  page  of  minute  particularity.  The 
result  is  not  a  mere  dead  catalogue:  it  is  a 
palpitating  image  of  lurid  truth.  Never  was 
the  sordid  horror  which  lurks  in  places  and 
in  things  evoked  with  a  more  intense  com- 
pleteness. 

Undoubtedly  it  is  in  descriptions  of  the 
sordid,  the  squalid,  the  ugly,  and  the  mean 
that  Balzac  particularly  excels.  He  is  at  his 
greatest  when  he  is  revealing  the  horrible 
underside  of  civilisation — the  indignities  of 
poverty,  the  low  intrigues  of  parasites,  the 
long  procession  of  petty  agonies  that  embitter 
and  ruin  a  life.  Over  this  world  of  shadow 
and  grime  he  throws  strange  lights.  Extraor- 
dinary silhouettes  flash  out  and  vanish;  one 
has  glimpses  of  obscure  and  ominous  move- 
ments on  every  side;  and,  amid  all  this,  some 
sudden  vision  emerges  from  the  darkness,  of 
pathos,  of  tenderness,  of  tragic  and  unutter- 
able pain. 

Balzac  died  in  1850,  and  at  about  that  time 
the  Romantic  Movement  came  to  an  end. 
Victor  Hugo,  it  is  true,  continued  to  live  and 
to  produce  for  more  than  thirty  years  longer; 
but  French  literature  ceased  to  be  dominated 
by  the  ideals  of  the  Romantic  school.  That 


THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT     231 

school  had  accomplished  much;  it  had  re- 
created French  poetry,  and  it  had  revolu- 
tionised French  prose.  But,  by  the  very 
nature  of  its  achievement,  it  led  the  way  to 
its  own  supersession.  The  spirit  which  ani- 
mated its  doctrines  was  the  spirit  of  progress 
and  of  change;  it  taught  that  there  were  no 
fixed  rules  for  writing  well;  that  art,  no  less 
than  science,  lived  by  experiment;  that  a 
literature  which  did  not  develop  was  dead. 
Therefore  it  was  inevitable  that  the  Romantic 
ideal  itself  should  form  the  stepping-stone  for 
a  fresh  advance.  The  complex  work  of  Balzac 
unites  in  a  curious  way  many  of  the  most 
important  elements  of  the  old  school  and  of 
the  new.  Alike  by  his  vast  force,  his  im- 
mense variety,  his  formlessness,  his  lack  of 
critical  and  intellectual  power,  he  was  a 
Romantic;  but  he  belonged  to  the  future  in 
his  enormous  love  of  prosaic  detail,  his  mate- 
rialist cast  of  mind,  and  his  preoccupation 
with  actual  facts. 


CHAPTER  VH 

THE  AGE   OF   CRITICISM 

WITH  the  generation  of  writers  who  rose 
to  eminence  after  the  death  of  Balzac,  we 
come  within  the  reach  of  living  memory,  so 
that  a  just  estimate  of  their  work  is  well-nigh 
impossible:  it  is  so  close  to  us  that  it  is 
bound  to  be  out  of  focus.  And  there  is  an 
additional  difficulty  in  the  extreme  richness 
and  variety  of  their  accomplishment.  They 
explored  so  many  fields  of  literature,  and 
produced  so  much  of  interest  and  importance, 
that  a  short  account  of  their  work  can  hardly 
fail  to  give  a  false  impression  of  it.  Only  its 
leading  characteristics  and  its  most  remark- 
able manifestations  can  be  touched  upon  here. 

The  age  was  before  all  else  an  age  of 
Criticism.  A  strong  reaction  set  in  against 
the  looseness  of  construction  and  the  extrava- 
gance of  thought  which  had  pervaded  the 
work  of  the  Romantics;  and  a  new  ideal  was 
set  up — an  ideal  which  was  to  combine  the 
width  and  diversity  of  the  latter  with  the 
precision  of  form  and  the  deliberate  artistic 

232 


THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM         233 

purpose  of  the  Classical  age.  The  movement 
affected  the  whole  of  French  literature,  but 
its  most  important  results  were  in  the  domain 
of  Prose.  Nowhere  were  the  defects  of  the 
Romantics  more  obvious  than  in  their  treat- 
ment of  history.  With  a  very  few  exceptions 
they  conceived  of  the  past  as  a  picturesque 
pageant — a  thing  of  contrasts  and  costumes, 
an  excuse  for  rhetorical  descriptions,  without 
inner  significance  or  a  real  life  of  its  own.  One 
historian  of  genius  they  did  indeed  produce — 
MICHELET;  and  the  contrast  between  his 
work  and  that  of  his  successors,  TAINE  and 
RENAN,  is  typical  of  the  new  departure.  The 
great  history  of  Michelet,  with  its  strange, 
convulsive  style,  its  capricious  and  imagina- 
tive treatment  of  facts,  and  its  undisguised 
bias,  shows  us  the  spectacle  of  the  past  in  a 
series  of  lurid  lightning-flashes — a  spectacle 
at  once  intensely  vivid  and  singularly  con- 
torted; it  is  the  history  of  a  poet  rather  than 
of  a  man  of  science.  With  Taine  and  Renan 
the  personal  element  which  forms  the  very 
foundation  of  Michelet's  work  has  been 
carefully  suppressed.  It  is  replaced  by  an 
elaborate  examination  of  detail,  a  careful, 
sober,  unprejudiced  reconstruction  of  past 
conditions,  an  infinitely  conscientious  en- 
deavour to  tell  the  truth  and  nothing  but 


234  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

the  truth.  Nor  is  their  history  merely  the 
dead  bones  of  analysis  and  research;  it  is 
informed  with  an  untiring  sympathy;  and — 
in  the  case  of  Renan  especially — a  suave  and 
lucid  style  adds  the  charm  and  amenity  which 
art  alone  can  give. 

The  same  tendencies  appear  to  a  still 
more  remarkable  degree  in  Criticism.  With 
SAINTE-BEUVE,  in  fact,  one  might  almost 
say  that  criticism,  as  we  know  it,  came  into 
existence  for  the  first  time.  Before  him,  all 
criticism  had  been  one  of  two  things:  it  had 
been  either  a  merely  personal  expression  of 
opinion,  or  else  an  attempt  to  establish  uni- 
versal literary  canons  and  to  judge  of  writers 
by  the  standards  thus  set  up.  Sainte-Beuve 
realised  that  such  methods — the  slap-dash 
pronouncements  of  a  Johnson  or  the  narrow 
generalisations  of  a  Boileau — were  in  reality 
not  critical  at  all.  He  saw  that  the  critic's 
first  duty  was  not  to  judge,  but  to  understand; 
and  with  this  object  he  set  himself  to  explore 
all  the  facts  which  could  throw  light  on  the 
temperament,  the  outlook,  the  ideals  of  his 
author;  he  examined  his  biography,  the  soci- 
ety in  which  he  lived,  the  influences  of  his 
age;  and  with  the  apparatus  thus  patiently 
formed  he  proceeded  to  act  as  the  interpreter 
between  the  author  and  the  public.  His 


THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM         235 

Causeries  du  Lundi — short  critical  papers 
originally  contributed  to  a  periodical  maga- 
zine and  subsequently  published  in  a  long 
series  of  volumes — together  with  his  Port 
Royal — an  elaborate  account  of  the  move- 
ments in  letters  and  philosophy  during  the 
earlier  years  of  Louis  XIV's  reign — contain  a 
mass  of  material  of  unequalled  value  concern- 
ing the  whole  of  French  literature.  His  ana- 
lytical and  sympathetic  mind  is  reflected  in 
the  quiet  wit  and  easy  charm  of  his  writing. 
Undoubtedly  the  lover  of  French  literature 
will  find  in  Sainte-Beuve's  Lundis  at  once  the 
most  useful  and  the  most  agreeable  review  of 
the  subject  in  all  its  branches;  and  the  more 
his  knowledge  increases,  the  more  eagerly 
will  he  return  for  further  guidance  and 
illumination  to  those  delightful  books. 

But  the  greatest  prose-writer  of  the  age 
devoted  himself  neither  to  history  nor  to 
criticism — though  his  works  are  impregnated 
with  the  spirit  of  both — but  to  Fiction.  In 
his  novels,  FLAUBERT  finally  accomplished 
what  Balzac  had  spasmodically  begun — the 
separation  of  the  art  of  fiction  from  the  un- 
reality, the  exaggeration,  and  the  rhetoric 
of  the  Romantic  School.  Before  he  began 
to  write,  the  movement  towards  a  greater 
restraint,  a  more  deliberate  art,  had  shown 


236  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

itself  in  a  few  short  novels  by  GEORGE  SAND — 
the  first  of  the  long  and  admirable  series  of 
her  mature  works — where,  especially  in  such 
delicate  masterpieces  as  La  Mare  au  Diable, 
La  Petite  Fadette,  and  Frangois  le  Champi,  her 
earlier  lyricism  and  incoherence  were  replaced 
by  an  idyllic  sentiment  strengthened  and  puri- 
fied by  an  exquisite  sense  of  truth.  Flaubert's 
genius  moved  in  a  very  different  and  a  far 
wider  orbit;  but  it  was  no  less  guided  by  the 
dictates  of  deliberate  art.  In  his  realism,  his 
love  of  detail,  and  his  penetrating  observation 
of  facts,  Flaubert  was  the  true  heir  of  Balzac; 
while  in  the  scrupulosity  of  his  style  and  the 
patient,  laborious,  and  sober  treatment  of  his 
material,  he  presented  a  complete  contrast  to 
his  great  predecessor.  These  latter  qualities 
make  Flaubert  the  pre-eminent  representative 
of  his  age.  The  critical  sense  possessed  him 
more  absolutely  and  with  more  striking  re- 
sults than  all  the  rest  of  his  contemporaries. 
His  watchfulness  over  his  own  work  was 
almost  infinite.  There  has  never  been  a 
writer  who  took  his  art  with  such  a  passionate 
seriousness,  who  struggled  so  incessantly 
towards  perfection,  and  who  suffered  so 
acutely  from  the  difficulties,  the  disappoint- 
ments, the  desperate,  furious  efforts  of  an  un- 
remitting toil.  His  style  alone  cost  him  bound- 


THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM         237 

less  labour.  He  would  often  spend  an  entire 
day  over  the  elaboration  and  perfection  of  a 
single  sentence,  which,  perhaps,  would  be 
altogether  obliterated  before  the  publication 
of  the  book.  He  worked  in  an  apoplectic 
fervour  over  every  detail  of  his  craft — elim- 
inating repetitions,  balancing  rhythms,  dis- 
covering the  precise  word  for  every  shade  of 
meaning,  with  an  extraordinary,  an  almost 
superhuman,  persistence.  And  in  the  treat- 
ment of  his  matter  his  conscientiousness  was 
equally  great.  He  prepared  for  his  historical 
novels  by  profound  researches  in  the  original 
authorities  of  the  period,  and  by  personal 
visits  to  the  localities  he  intended  to  describe. 
When  he  treated  of  modern  life  he  was  no  less 
scrupulously  exact.  One  of  his  scenes  was  to 
pass  in  a  cabbage-garden  by  moonlight.  But 
what  did  a  cabbage-garden  by  moonlight 
really  look  like?  Flaubert  waited  long  for  a 
propitious  night,  and  then  went  out,  note- 
book in  hand,  to  take  down  the  precise  details 
of  what  he  saw.  Thus  it  was  that  his  books 
were  written  very  slowly,  and  his  production 
comparatively  small.  He  spent  six  years 
over  the  first  and  most  famous  of  his  works — 
Madame  Bovary;  and  he  devoted  no  less  than 
thirteen  to  his  encyclopaedic  Bouvard  et  Pecu- 
chet,  which  was  still  unfinished  when  he  died. 


238  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

The  most  abiding  impression  produced  by 
the  novels  of  Flaubert  is  that  of  solidity. 
This  is  particularly  the  case  with  his  historical 
books.  The  bric-a-brac  and  fustian  of  the 
Romantics  has  disappeared,  to  be  replaced 
by  a  clear,  detailed,  profound  presentment  of 
the  life  of  the  past.  In  Salammbo,  ancient 
Carthage  rises  up  before  us,  no  crazy  vision 
of  a  picturesque  and  disordered  imagination, 
but  in  all  the  solidity  of  truth;  coloured,  not 
with  the  glaring  contrasts  of  rhetoric,  but  with 
the  real  blaze  of  an  eastern  sun;  strange,  not 
with  an  imported  fantastic  strangeness  manu- 
factured in  nineteenth-century  Paris,  but  with 
the  strangeness — so  much  more,  mysterious 
and  significant — of  the  actual,  barbaric  Past 

The  same  characteristics  appear  in  Flau- 
bert's modern  novels.  Madame  Bovary  gives 
us  a  picture  of  life  in  a  French  provincial 
town  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century — a 
picture  which,  with  its  unemphatic  tones,  its 
strong,  sensitive,  and  accurate  drawing,  its 
masterly  design,  produces  an  effect  of  abso- 
lutely convincing  veracity.  The  character 
and  the  fate  of  the  wretched  woman  who 
forms  the  central  figure  of  the  story  come  upon 
us,  amid  the  grim  tepidity  of  their  surround- 
ings, with  extraordinary  force.  Flaubert's 
genius  does  not  act  in  sudden  flashes,  but  by 


THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM         239 

the  method  of  gradual  accumulation.  The 
effects  which  it  produces  are  not  of  the  kind 
that  overwhelm  and  astonish,  but  of  the 
more  subtle  sort  that  creep  into  the  mind  by 
means  of  a  thousand  details,  an  infinitude  of 
elaborated  fibres,  and  which,  once  there,  are 
there  for  ever. 

The  solidity  of  Flaubert's  work,  however, 
was  not  unaccompanied  with  drawbacks. 
His  writing  lacks  fire;  there  is  often  a  sense 
of  effort  in  it;  and,  as  one  reads  his  careful, 
faultless,  sculpturesque  sentences,  it  is  diffi- 
cult not  to  long,  at  times,  for  some  of  the 
irregular  vitality  of  Balzac.  Singularly 
enough,  Flaubert's  correspondence — one  of 
the  most  interesting  collections  of  letters  in 
the  language — shows  that,  so  far  as  his  per- 
sonal character  was  concerned,  irregular 
vitality  was  precisely  one  of  his  dominating 
qualities.  But  in  his  fiction  he  suppressed 
this  side  of  himself  in  the  interests,  as  he  be- 
lieved, of  art.  It  was  his  theory  that  a  com- 
plete detachment  was  a  necessary  condition 
for  all  great  writing;  and  he  did  his  best  to  put 
this  theory  into  practice.  But  there  was  one 
respect  in  which  he  did  not  succeed  in  his  en- 
deavour. His  hatred  and  scorn  of  the  mass  of 
humanity,  his  conception  of  them  as  a  stupid, 
ignorant,  and  vulgar  herd,  appears  through- 


240  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

out  his  work,  and  in  his  unfinished  Bouvard  et 
Pecuchet  reaches  almost  to  the  proportion  of  a 
monomania.  The  book  is  an  infinitely  elab- 
orate and  an  infinitely  bitter  attack  on  the 
ordinary  man.  There  is  something  tragic  in 
the  spectacle  of  this  lonely,  noble,  and  potent 
genius  wearing  out  his  life  at  last  over  such 
a  task — in  a  mingled  agony  of  unconscious 
frenzied  self-expression  and  deliberate  mis- 
guided self-immolation. 

In  poetry,  the  reaction  against  Romanti- 
cism had  begun  with  the  fimaux  et  Camees  of 
THEOPHILE  GATJTIER — himself  in  his  youth 
one  of  the  leaders  of  the  Romantic  School; 
and  it  was  carried  further  in  the  work  of  a 
group  of  writers  known  as  the  Parnassiens — 
the  most  important  of  whom  were  LECONTE 
DE  LISLE,  SULLY  PRUDHOMME,  and  HEREDIA. 
Their  poetry  bears  the  same  relation  to  that 
of  Musset  as  the  history  of  Renan  bears  to 
that  of  Michelet,  and  the  prose  of  Flaubert  to 
that  of  Hugo.  It  is  restrained,  impersonal, 
and  polished  to  the  highest  degree.  The 
bulk  of  it  is  not  great;  but  not  a  line  of  it  is 
weak  or  faulty;  and  it  possesses  a  firm  and 
plastic  beauty,  well  expressed  by  the  title  of 
Gautier's  volume,  and  the  principles  of  which 
are  at  once  explained  and  exemplified  in  his 
famous  poem  beginning — 


THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM         241 

"Oui,  1'ceuvre  sort  plus  belle 
D'une  forme  au  travail 

Rebelle, 
— Vers,  marbre,  onyx,  email." 

The  Parnassiens  particularly  devoted  them- 
selves to  classical  subjects,  and  to  descrip- 
tions of  tropical  scenes.  Their  rich,  sonorous, 
splendidly  moulded  language  invests  their 
visions  with  a  noble  fixity,  an  impressive  force. 
Among  the  gorgeous  descriptive  pieces  of 
Leconte  de  Lisle,  the  exquisite  lyrics  of  Sully 
Prudhomme,  and  the  chiselled  sonnets  of 
Heredia  some  of  the  finest  and  weightiest 
verse  of  the  century  is  to  be  found. 

The  age  produced  one  other  poet  who, 
however,  by  the  spirit  of  his  work,  belongs 
rather  to  the  succeeding  epoch  than  to  his 
own.  This  was  BAUDELAIRE,  whose  small 
volume — Les  Fleurs  du  Mai — gives  him  a 
unique  place  among  the  masters  of  the  poetic 
art.  In  his  form,  indeed,  he  is  closely  related 
to  his  contemporaries.  His  writing  has  all 
the  care,  the  balance,  the  conscientious  polish 
of  the  Parnassiens;  it  is  in  his  matter  that 
he  differs  from  them  completely.  He  was 
not  interested  in  classical  imaginations  and 
impersonal  descriptions;  he  was  concerned 
almost  entirely  with  the  modern  life  of  Paris 


242  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

and  the  actual  experiences  of  a  disillusioned 
soul.  As  intensely  personal  as  the  Parnas- 
siens  were  detached,  he  poured  into  his 
verse  all  the  gloom  of  his  own  character, 
all  the  bitterness  of  his  own  philosophy,  all 
the  agony  of  his  own  despair.  Some  poets — 
such  as  Keats  and  Chenier — in  spite  of  the 
misfortunes  of  their  lives,  seem  to  distil 
nothing  but  happiness  and  the  purest  beauty 
into  their  poetry;  they  only  come  to  their 
true  selves  amid  the  sunlight  and  the  flowers. 
Other  writers — such  as  Swift  and  Tacitus — 
rule  supreme  over  the  kingdom  of  darkness 
and  horror,  and  their  finest  pages  are  written 
in  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow  of  Death. 
Writers  of  this  kind  are  very  rarely  poets; 
and  it  is  Baudelaire's  great  distinction  that  he 
was  able  to  combine  the  hideous  and  devasta- 
ting conceptions  of  complete  pessimism  with 
the  passion,  the  imagination,  and  the  formal 
beauty  that  only  live  in  magnificent  verse. 
[  sVu~  He  is  the  Swift  of  poetry.  His  vision  is  black 
and  terrible.  Some  of  his  descriptions  are 
even  more  disgusting  than  those  of  Swift,  and 
most  of  his  pages  are  no  fit  reading  for  the 
young  and  ignorant.  But  the  wise  reader 
will  find  in  this  lurid  poetry  elements  of  pro- 
fundity and  power  which  are  rare  indeed. 
Above  all,  he  will  find  in  it  a  quality  not 


THE  AGE  OF  CRITICISM          243 

common  in  French  poetry — a  passionate 
imagination  which  clothes  the  thought  with 
splendour,  and  lifts  the  strange  words  of 
this  unhappy  mortal  into  the  deathless  re- 
gions of  the  sublime. 


CONCLUSION 

WITH  the  death  of  Flaubert  in  1880,  French 
literature  entered  upon  a  new  phase — a  phase 
which,  in  its  essential  qualities,  has  lasted  till 
to-day,  and  which  forms  a  suitable  point  for 
the  conclusion  of  the  present  sketch. 

This  last  phase  has  been  dominated  by 
two  men  of  genius.  In  prose,  MAUPASSANT 
carried  on  the  work  of  Flaubert  with  a 
sharper  manner  and  more  vivid  style,  though 
with  a  narrower  range.  He  abandoned  the 
exotic  and  the  historical  visions  of  his  pred- 
ecessor, and  devoted  himself  entirely,  in 
his  brilliant  novels  and  yet  more  brilliant 
short  stories,  to  an  almost  fiendishly  realistic 
treatment  of  modern  life.  A  precisely  con- 
trary tendency  marks  the  poetry  of  VERLAINE. 
While  Maupassant  completely  disengaged 
prose  from  every  alien  element  of  poetry  and 
imagination,  pushing  it  as  far  as  it  could  go 
in  the  direction  of  incisive  realism,  Verlaine 
and  his  fellow-workers  in  verse  attempted  to 
make  poetry  more  truly  poetical  than  it  had 
ever  been  before,  to  introduce  into  it  the 
vagueness  and  dreaminess  of  individual  moods 

244 


CONCLUSION  245 

and  spiritual  fluctuations,  to  turn  it  away 
from  definite  fact  and  bring  it  near  to  music. 
It  was  with  Verlaine  and  his  successors 
that  French  verse  completely  broke  away 
from  the  control  of  those  classical  rules,  the 
infallibility  of  which  had  been  first  attacked 
by  the  Romantics.  In  order  to  express  the 
delicate,  shifting,  and  indecisive  feelings 
which  he  loved  so  well,  Verlaine  abolished  the 
last  shreds  of  rhythmical  regularity,  making 
his  verse  a  perfectly  fluid  substance,  which  he 
could  pour  at  will  into  the  subtle  mould  of  his 
feeling  and  his  thought.  The  result  justified 
the  means.  Verlaine's  poetry  exhales  an 
exquisite  perfume — strange,  indistinct,  and 
yet,  after  the  manner  of  perfume,  unforget- 
table. Listening  to  his  enchanting,  poignant 
music,  we  hear  the  trembling  voice  of  a  soul. 
This  last  sad  singer  carries  us  back  across  the 
ages,  and,  mingling  his  sweet  strain  with  the 
distant  melancholy  of  Villon,  symbolises  for 
us  at  once  the  living  flower  and  the  unchang- 
ing root  of  the  great  literature  of  France. 

We  have  now  traced  the  main  outlines  of 
that  literature  from  its  dim  beginnings  in  the 
Dark  Ages  up  to  the  threshold  of  the  present 
time.  Looking  back  over  the  long  line  of 
writers,  the  first  impression  that  must  strike 


246  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

us  is  one  of  extraordinary  wealth.  France, 
it  is  true,  has  given  to  the  world  no  genius  of 
the  colossal  stature  and  universal  power  of 
Shakespeare.  But,  then,  where  is  the  equal 
of  Shakespeare  to  be  found?  Not  even  in 
the  glorious  literature  of  Greece  herself. 
Putting  out  of  account  such  an  immeasurable 
magnitude,  the  number  of  writers  of  the  first 
rank  produced  by  France  can  be  paralleled  in 
only  one  other  modern  literature — that  of 
England.  The  record  is,  indeed,  a  splendid 
one  which  contains,  in  poetry  and  drama, 
the  names  of  Villon,  Ronsard,  Corneille, 
Moliere,  Racine,  La  Fontaine,  Chenier,  La- 
martine,  Hugo,  Vigny,  Gautier,  Baudelaire, 
Verlaine;  and  in  prose  those  of  Froissart, 
Rabelais,  Montaigne,  Pascal,  Bossuet,  La 
Rochefoucauld,  La  Bruyere,  Montesquieu, 
Saint-Simon,  Voltaire,  Diderot,  Rousseau, 
Chateaubriand,  Balzac,  Flaubert,  and  Mau- 
passant. And,  besides  this  great  richness 
and  variety,  another  consideration  gives  a 
peculiar  value  to  the  literature  of  France. 
More  than  that  of  any  other  nation  in  Europe, 
it  is  distinctive  and  individual;  if  it  had 
never  existed,  the  literature  of  the  world 
would  have  been  bereft  of  certain  qualities 
of  the  highest  worth  which  France  alone  has 
been  able  to  produce.  Where  else  could  we 


CONCLUSION  247 

find  the  realism  which  would  replace  that  of 
Stendhal  and  Balzac,  Flaubert,  and  Mau- 
passant? Where  else  should  we  look  for  the 
brilliant  lucidity  and  consummate  point 
which  Voltaire  has  given  us?  Or  the  force 
and  the  precision  that  glow  in  Pascal?  Or 
the  passionate  purity  that  blazes  in  Racine? 
Finally,  if  we  would  seek  for  the  essential 
spirit  of  French  literature,  where  shall  we 
discover  it?  In  its  devotion  to  truth?  In  its 
love  of  rhetoric?  In  its  clarity?  In  its  gener- 
alising power?  All  these  qualities  are  pecu- 
liarly its  own,  but,  beyond  and  above  them, 
there  is  another  which  controls  and  animates 
the  rest.  The  one  high  principle  which, 
through  so  many  generations,  has  guided  like 
a  star  the  writers  of  France  is  the  principle 
of  deliberation,  of  intention,  of  a  conscious 
search  for  ordered  beauty;  an  unwavering, 
an  indomitable  pursuit  of  the  endless  glories 
of  art. 


CHRONOLOGICAL    LIST    OF    AUTHORS 
AND   THEIR  PRINCIPAL  WORKS 

I.  Middle  Ages. 

CHANSONS  DE  GESTE,  eleventh  to  thirteenth  centuries. 

Chanson  de  Roland,  circa  1080. 
ROMANS  BRETONS,  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries. 
CHRETIEN  DE  TROYES,  wrote  circa  1170-1180. 
FABLIAUX,  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries. 

Roman  de  Renard,  thirteenth  century. 

Aucassin  el  Nicolete,  circa  thirteenth  century. 

VlLLEHAHDOTJIN,  d.  1213. 

Conquete  de  Constantinople,  1205-1213. 

GUILLATJME   DE   LORRIS  (?) 

Roman  de  la  Rose  (first  part),  circa  1237. 
JEAN  DE  MEUNG,  d.  1305. 

Roman  de  la  Rose  (second  part),  1277. 
JOINVILLE,  1224-1319. 

Vie  de  Saint  Louis,  1309. 
FROISSART,  1337-circa  1410. 

Chroniques,  1373-1400. 
VILLON,  1431-  (?) 

Grand  Testament,  1461. 
COMMYNES,  circa  1447-1511. 

Memoires,  1488-1498. 

II.  Renaissance. 

MAROT,  1496-1544. 
RABELAIS,  circa  1500-1553. 
RONSARD,  1524-1585. 
Du  BELLAY,  1525-1560. 

Defense  el  Illustration  de  la  Langue  Franqaise,  1549- 
248 


LIST  OF  AUTHORS  249 

JODELLE,  1532-1573. 

Cleopatre,  1552. 
MONTAIGNE,  1533-1592. 

Essays,  1580-1588. 

III.  Age  of  Transition. 
MALHERBE,  1555-1628. 

Odes,  1607-1628. 
HARDY,  circa  1570-1631. 

Tragedies,  1593-1630. 
ACADEMY,  founded  1629. 
CORNEILLE,  1606-1684. 

Le  Cid,  1636. 

Horace,  1640. 

Cinna,  1640. 

Polyeucte,  1643. 
PASCAL,  1623-1662. 

Lettres  Provinciates,  1656-1657. 

Pensees,  first  edition  1670,  first  complete  edition  1844. 

IV.  Age  of  Louis  XIV. 
MOLIERE,  1622-1673. 

Les  Precieuses  Ridicules,  1659. 

Lficole  des  Femmes,  1662. 

Tartufe,  1664. 

Le  Misanthrope,  1666. 

Le  Malade  Imaginaire,  1673. 
LA  ROCHEFOUCAULD,  1613-1689. 

Maximes,  1665. 
BOILEAU,  1636-1711. 

Satires,  1666. 

Art  Poetique,  1674. 
RACINE,  1639-1699. 

Andromaque,  1667. 

Phedre,  1677. 

Athalie,  1691. 
LA  FONTAINE,  1621-1695. 

Fables,  1668-1692. 
BOSSUET,  1627-1704. 

Oraisons  Funebrcs,  1669-1687. 

Histoire  Univcrsclle,  1681. 
MADAME  DE  SEVIGNE,  1626-1696. 

Letters,  1671-1696. 


250  LIST  OF  AUTHORS 

MADAME  DE  LAFAYETTE,  1634-1696. 

La  Princesse  de  Cleves,  1678. 
LA  BRUYEBE,  1645-1696. 

Lea  Carocteres,  1688-1694. 

V.  Eighteenth  Century. 

FONTENELLE,  1657-1757. 

Histoire  des  Oracles,  1687. 
BATLE,  1647-1706. 

Dictionnaire  Historique  et  Critique,  1697. 
FENELON,  1651-1713. 

TeUmaque,  1699. 
MONTESQUIEU,  1689-1755. 

Lettres  Persanes,  1721. 

Esprit  des  Lois,  1748. 
VOLTAIRE,  1694-1778. 

Henriade,  1723. 

Zaire,  1732. 

Lettres  Philosophiques,  1734. 

Essai  sur  les  Masurs,  1751-1756. 

Candide,  1759. 

Dictionnaire  PhUosophique,  1764. 

Dialogues,  etc.,  1755-1778. 
LE  SAGE,  1668-1747. 

Gil  Bias,  1715-1735. 
MARIVAUX,  1688-1763. 

Vie  de  Marianne,  1731-1741. 

Jeu  de  I' Amour  et  du  Hasard,  1734. 
SAINT-SIMON,  1675-1755. 

Memoires,  begun  1740,  first  edition  1830. 
DIDEROT,  1713-1784. 

Encyclopedic,  1751-1780. 

La  Religieuse,  first  edition  1796. 

Neveu  de  Rameau,  first  edition  1823. 
ROUSSEAU,  1712-1778. 

Nouvelle  Helafise,  1761. 

Control  Social,  1762. 

Confessions,  first  edition  1781-1788. 
BEAUMARCHAIS,  1732-1799. 

Manage  de  Figaro,  1784. 
CONDORCET,  1743-1794. 

Progres  de  I' Esprit  Humain,  1794. 
CHENIER,  1762-1794. 

Poems,  1790-1794,  first  edition  1819. 


LIST  OF  AUTHORS  251 

VI.  Nineteenth  Century,  I. 
CHATEAUBRIAND,  1768-1848. 

Atcda,  1801. 

Genie  du  Christianisme,  1802. 

Memoires  d'Outre-Tombe,  published  1849. 
LAMARTINE,  1790-1869. 

Meditations,  1820. 
HUGO,  1802-1885. 

Hernani,  1830. 

Feuilles  d'Automne,  1831. 

Notre-Dame  de  Paris,  1831. 

Chdtiments,  1852. 

Contemplations,  1856. 

Legende  des  Siecles,  1859. 

Les  Miserables,  1862. 
VIGNY,  1797-1863. 

Poemes  Antiques  et  Modernes,  1826. 

Servitude  et  Grandeur  Militaires,  1835. 
MUSSET,  1810-1857. 

Caprices  de  Marianne,  1833. 

Lorenzaccio,  1834. 

Les  Nuits,  1835-1840. 
GEORGE  SAND,  1804-1876. 

Indiana,  1832. 

Frangois  le  Champi,  1850. 
STENDHAL,  1783-1842. 

Le  Rouge  et  le  Noir,  1831. 
BALZAC,  1799-1850. 

Comedie  Humaine,  1829-1850. 
MICHELET,  1798-1874. 

History,  1833-1867. 

VII.  Nineteenth  Century,  II. 
SAINTE-BEUVE,  1804-1869. 

Lundis,  1850-1869. 
RENAN,  1823-1892. 

Vie  de  Jesus,  1863. 
TAINE,  1828-1893. 
FLAUBERT,  1821-1880. 

Madame  Bovary,  1857. 

Salammbo,  1862. 
GAUTIER,  1811-1872. 

Emaux  et  Camees,  1852. 


252  LIST  OF  AUTHORS 

BAUDELAIRE,  1821-1867. 

Fleures  du  Mai?  1857. 
LECONTE  DE  LISLE,  1820-1894. 

Poems,  1853-1884. 
SULLY  PRUDHOMME,  1839-1908. 

Poems,  1865-1888. 
HEREDIA,  1842-1906. 

Les  Trophees,  1893. 
MAUPASSANT,  1850-1893. 
VEKLAINE,  1844-1896. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

THE  number  of  works  dealing  with  the  history  and  criticism 
of  French  literature  is  very  large  indeed.    The  following  are 
the  most  useful  reviews  of  the  whole  subject: — 
PETIT  DE  JULLEVILLE.    Histoire  de  la  Langue  et  de  la  Littera- 

ture  franqaise  (8  vols.). 

LANSON.    Histoire  de  la  Litterature  franqaise  (1  vol.). 
BRUNETIERE.    Manuel  de  I'histoire  de  la  Literature  franqaise 

(1  vol.). 
DOWDEN.     History  of  French  Literature  (1  vol.). 

An  excellent  series  of  biographies  of  the  principal  authors, 
by  the  leading  modern  critics,  is  that  of  Les  Grands  Ecrivains 
Franqais  (published  by  Hachette). 

The  critical  essays  of  Sainte-Beuve  are  particularly  valuable. 
They  are  contained  in  his  Causeries  du  Lundi,  Premiers  Lundis, 
Nouveaux  Lundis,  Portraits  de  Femmes,  Portraits  Litteraires, 
and  Portraits  Contemporains. 

Some  interesting  criticisms  of  modern  writers  are  to  be  found 
in  La  Vie  Litteraire,  by  Anatole  France. 

Editions  of  the  principal  authors  are  very  numerous.  The 
monumental  series  of  Les  Grands  Ecrivains  de  la  France 
(Hachette)  contains  complete  texts  of  most  of  the  great 
writers,  with  elaborate  and  scholarly  commentaries  of  the 
highest  value.  Cheaper  editions  of  the  masterpieces  of  the 
language  are  published  by  Hachette,  La  Bibliotheque  Na- 
tionale,  Jean  Gillequin,  Nelson,  Dent,  Gowans,  and  Gray. 

There  are  also  numerous  lyrical  anthologies,  of  which  two  of 
the  best  are  Les  Chefs-d'oeuvre  de  la  Poesie  lyrique  franqaise 
(Gowans  and  Gray)  and  The  Oxford  Book  of  French  Verse 
(Clarendon  Press).  But  it  must  be  remembered  that  the 
greater  part  of  what  is  most  characteristic  in  French  literature 
appears  in  its  poetic  drama  and  its  prose,  and  is  therefore 
necessarily  excluded  from  such  collections. 
253 


INDEX 


(The  italic  figures  indicate'the  more  important  references.) 


ACADEMY,  the  French,  47-9 

JEsop,  111,  112 

Arnold,  M.,  89 

Aucassin  et  Nicolete,  13-15 

Austen,  Miss,  226 

Balzac,  2S5-31,  235,  236,  239,  247 

Baudelaire,  241-3 

Bayle,  135 

Beaumarchais,  196 

Bernard  of  Clairvaux,  182 

Boijeau,  73-7,  200,  234 

Bolingbroke,  144 

Bossuet,   119-22,   127,   138,   171, 

181,  202 

Bourgogne,  Due  de,  134 
Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  48 
Buffon,  166 
Byron,  48 

Galas,  177 

Catherine  of  Russia,  162 

Cervantes,  77 

Chanson  de  Roland,  9-10,  15 

Chansons  de  Geste,  8—10,  12  . 

Chapelain,  76 

Chateaubriand,  #03-5,  208 

Chfinier,  Andre,  200-1,  242 

Chretien  de  Troyes,  11 

Columbus,  156 

Commynes,  21-2 

Condoreet,  161,  166 

Congreve,  48 

Constant,  Benjamin,  221 

Copernicus,  60,  156 

Corneille,  49-56,  57,  66,  76,  81, 

202 
Cotin,  l'Abb6,  76 

Dalembert,  162,  165 

Dante,  77,  142 

Diderot,  47,  162-5,  181,  184,  185, 

191 

Dryden,  89 
Du  Bellay,  29,  32 
Du  Chatelet,  Mme.,  168 


Du  Deffand,  Mme.,  139 
Dumas,  208,  213 

Encyclopaedia,  The,  161-3 

Fabliaux,  11,12,  201 

Fenelon,  133-4 

Flaubert,  47,  235-40,  244,  247 

Fontenelle,  134-5 

Francis  I,  27,  43 

Frederick  the  Great,  162,  168 

Froissart,  20-1,  56 

Gautier,  ThSophile,  208,  240-1 
Gray,  48 

Hardy,  49,  50,  51 

Helvetius,  166 

Heredia,  240-1 

Holbach,  166 

Homer,  142 

Hugo,  50,  208,  209,  213-18,  223-4, 

225,  230,  240 
Hume,  195 

James,  Mr.  Henry,  226 
Jodelle,  50,  51 
Johnson,  Dr.,  234 
Joinville,  16-18,  56 

Keats,  201,  242 

Lab6,  Louise,  32 

La  Bruyere,  122,  124-31,  150,  202 

Laclos,  222 

Lafayette,  Mme.  de,  221 

La  Fontaine,  12,  73,  110-19,  122, 

200,  202 

Lamartine,  205-6,  208 
La  Rochefoucauld,  122-4,  127 
Leconte  de  Lisle,  240-1 
Le  Sage,  221 
Locke,  144 

Lords,  Guillaume  de,  18,  19 
Louis  IX,  17-18 


255 


256 


INDEX 


Louis  XI,  22 
Louis  XIV,  62-65,  130 
Louis  XV,  155 
Luther,  156 

Machiavelli,  22 

Malherbe,  43-6,  46,  57,  208 

Marivaux,  145-7,  220,  222 

Marlowe,  50 

Marmontel/165 

Marot,  28-9 

Maupassant,  244,  247 

Meung,  Jean  de,  19-20,  33 

Michelet,  833,  240 

Milton,  121,  141 

Moliere,  47,  73,  77-89,  118,  131 

Montaigne,  87-41,  42,  43,  56 

Montesquieu,    186-40,   145,    155, 

159,  171 
Musset,  208,  218,  219-20,  240 

Parnassiens,  Les,  240-1,  242 
Pascal,  66-61,  181,  202,  247 
Philosophes,  Les,  166-62,  166-7, 

187-8,  199 

PUiade,  La,  29-33,  43,  44 
Pombal,  162 
Pope,  190 
Pradon,  76 

Precieux,  Lea,  46-7,  56,  76 
Prevost,  1'Abbe,  221 

Rabelais,  S3-?,  43,  56,  165,  202 
Racine,  51,  66,   73,  78,  89-110, 

119,   122,   131,   141,   145,  200, 

202,  210,  247 
Renan,  233,  240 
Richelieu,  Cardinal  de,  43,  47,  49 


Romans  Bretons,  10-11 
Roman  de  Renard,  12 
Roman  de  la  Rose,  18-20 
Ronsard,  233,  240 
Rousseau,  Jean-Jacques,  40,  157, 
184-96,  203,  204-5,  222 

Sainte-Beuve,  234-5 

Saint-Simon,  148-66,  191,  216 

Sand,  George,  223,  236 

Scott,  48 

Scudery,  Mile,  de,  221 

Se'vignl,  Mme.  de,  66 

Shakespeare,    48,    77,    80,    82-3, 

91-2,  95-9,  101,  246 
Sirven,  177 
Sophocles,  109 
Stendhal,  224,  247 
Sully  Prudhomme,  240-1 
Swift,  128,  242 

Tacitus,  242 
Taine,  233 
Theocritus,  201 
Turgot,  157,  165 

Verlaine,  244-5 

Versailles,  63-5,   127,   137,   149- 

50,  152-3 

Vigny,  208,  218-19 
Villehardouin,  15-16,  17 
Villon,  23-6,  26,  32,  245 
Virgil,  142 
Voltaire,  48,  140-5,  155,  167-84, 

190-1,    196,   202-3,   204,    213, 

247 

Watteau,  146 
Wordsworth,  102 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 

This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  staniped  below. 

— REPD 


,;^^ 


JUN  04  1979 


Form  L9-Series  4939 


7 


3  1158008369448 


S89  1 


A    001281162    6 


